Thread below the Gardening Thread: Obama's Long Good-bye [KT]

Well, it's Christmas Eve Day. Hope we all get a little time to relax and reflect on something nice. Don't let distraught progressives spoil the day.

Back on the 14th of this month, before the Last Presidential Hawaiian Vacation started, Victor Davis Hanson wrote one of his responses to an angry reader. This particular angry reader equated Mr. Obama's popularity in polls with his job performance. I still see lines like the following repeated on Facebook. So tiresome: "I think he did quite well considering that Republicans vowed on the first day not to work with him and never did!"

VDH is calm, as usual:

Obama, I think as of this weekend had a 53% approval according to the realclearpolitics.com average. But in just a year, yes, he has jumped 10 points. Why?

No one quite knows, but I will suggest 5 reasons;

1) Obama understood that he was unpopular in the flesh and popular in the abstract. . . .

What bothers me the most about the "in the flesh" Obama is hearing him speak. Maybe this is one reason that Obama has been doing even more of this lately than usual:

After going through a number of reasons for Obama's relative popularity, VDH ends with:

Such was the epitaph to "hope and change"--the greatest gift to the Republican Party in a century.

It's not that Obama has quit doing destructive things. It's that, lately, his image and voice are rarely connected to those things.

Do you think Obama's image will remain better than popular opinion about his record? I get the feeling that he is going to return to the public eye, trying to burnish his "legacy".

In the meantime, I am ready to focus on some more positive things. Anything nice going on in your life?

posted by Open Blogger at 11:10 AM

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