But other sources put things another way. Pollster Gallup tells us "Obama's Approval Equal To or Better Than Bush's, Clinton's," while online news source Raw Story says, "President Obama's approval rating slips -- to double Bush's." Turns out that Obama isn't so doomed. In fact, he's doing OK.
According to Gallup, at this point in his presidency, Bill Clinton scored a 53% approval rating. George W. Bush sat at 58% in March of 2001. Barack Obama has a 61% approval rating. Raw Story's piece compares Obama's approvals now to Bush's on leaving office.
In a March 12-15 poll conducted by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN, Obama’s approval rating declined to 64 percent from 76 percent in February. His disapproval rating edged up to 34 percent from 23 percent.
Bush's last approval rating by Opinion Research was 31 percent -- less than half Obama's; his disapproval rating was 68 percent. Bush scored lowest in his last week in a Pew Research poll, with just 24 percent of Americans saying they approved of his work on the job.
Different polls, sure, but similar findings; Obama has gone from an insanely popular president to a really popular president. I guess you could say this was a problem. But I'd argue that when most people like you, most people like you -- you don't really find yourself in trouble until most people don't like you. Or, at least, until approvals and disapprovals are in the neighborhood of being evenly split. As it is, Obama's approvals are higher than the percentage who voted for him. That seems pretty decent to me.
That WSJ article about Obama's polling numbers falling? That was co-authored by pollster Scott Rasmussen with Douglas Schoen. It pays to point out that Rasmussen's numbers are way below everyone else's -- a 56% approval rating for the president. I suppose it's appropriate that their prophecy of doom is more dire than everyone else's as well... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
