New Marist poll brings more bad news for Obama

As with all polls, take this for what it’s worth:

[…] President Barack Obama’s approval rating has dipped to its lowest point since taking office.  Currently, 42% of registered voters approve of the job the president is doing while half — 50% — disapprove.  Eight percent are unsure.  When McClatchy-Marist last asked this question in its November 24th survey, 45% thought his performance was on the mark while 48% thought it was subpar, and 7% were unsure.  Prior to this survey, voters gave Mr. Obama his lowest approval rating in early October. 

[…]

The change has occurred among members of the president’s own party.  74% of Democrats think Obama is performing well in office while 21% do not, and 5% are unsure.  Late last month, those proportions stood at 83%, 11%, and 6%, respectively. 

[…]

“President Obama’s recent criticism of both Democrats and Republicans and his attempts to move to the center haven’t exactly endeared him with independents,” says Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, Director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.  “Instead, it’s ended up costing him support with his Democratic base.”

Punching hippies has its advantages.  For Republicans anyway.

(Hat Tip: Hot Air)

Republicans maintaining its edge going into September

I’m not a big polling cheerleader but here goes, as per Rasmussen:

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 of the important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports.

The GOP has consistently been trusted on most issues for months now, but in July they held the lead on only nine of the key issues.

Republicans lead Democrats 47% to 39% on the economy, which remains the most important issue to voters. Those numbers are nearly identical to those found in June. Republicans have held the advantage on the economy since May of last year.

But for the first time in months, Republicans now hold a slight edge on the issues of government ethics and corruption, 40% to 38%. Voters have been mostly undecided for the past several months on which party to trust more on this issue, but Democrats have held small leads since February.  Still, more than one-in-five voters (22%) are still not sure which party to trust more on ethics issues.

Wow. A two point lead on the ethics issue.  This certainly isn’t 2006 anymore.

Not to be a wet blanket, but it’s a byproduct of the two-party system that voters are turning to the Republicans.  Polls still show that the Republicans along with Democrats, are still held in complete disregard.

But voters are appearing to realize that corrupt, Democrats with pocket-book power, running wild in Washington D.C.,  is not in their best interests.

The campaign rolls on…

Sometimes I feel bad for the people who bought into the whole “hope and change” happy-talk of the 2008 campaign.

[T]his not a flashback of the presidential campaign, but it does feel awfully similar.

“….if you talk to my opponents, they’ll agree. They’ll say, ‘You’re right. The health-care system’s broken. For too many people, it’s getting worse.”’ They will — they will acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable. But you know what they tell me? We had that big health-care summit. ….but you heard — you heard what they said. They said, ‘Well, we agree with you. The current system’s unsustainable, but this is just not the right time to do it.’”

While campaigning for his health care bill, President Obama has summoned up some imagery and words that has often been left on the campaign trail. Today on the health care stump in Missouri it was Obama versus opponents. Twice today during the president’s health care speech in St. Charles, Missouri the president referred specifically to his “opponents.”

“I know that during the health-care debate opponents have tried to scare people, especially our seniors, into thinking that we are going after seniors’ Medicare benefits — that’s how Obama’s going to pay for his plan. When you look at the facts, that’s just plain wrong.”

And later, more talk about opponents.

Of course he’s reverting to “campaign mode”—-building straw men and then appearing to tear them down is what Obama does best.  This is why he was a good campaigner.  He put on his stern, “I have a dream” voice and railed against his opponent du jour.  And the sheeple applauded.

But it’s all smoke and mirrors, always has been.  What’s more interesting is how Obama’s rhetoric is completely divisive and petty.  Instead of rising to the position of President of the United States, he comes across as a partisan hack, looking after his political benefactors certain groups of Americans instead of all Americans.

More waste at the RNC

Michael Steele runs a tight ship over at the RNC, a real no-nonsense operation:

Rob Bickhart, the Republican National Committee official behind the embarrassing fundraising presentation reported this week byPOLITICO, has been paid at least $370,000 since last June by the RNC in salary and consulting fees.

The size of Bickhart’s compensation has been the talk of Republican fundraising circles for months, and a source of displeasure among some RNC donors who have been generally unhappy with what they see as the RNC’s lavish spending. One complained to POLITICO that Bickhart earns “more than the President of the United States.”

Between Bickhart’s salary – he is on pace to earn a little more than $196,000 annually – and his consulting fees – which tallied $240,000 in the second half of last year alone – it appears Bickhart could receive north of $500,000 per year from the RNC.

Randy Pullen, the RNC’s treasurer and chairman of the Arizona Republican Party said Bickhart’s consulting fees – paid through a firm Bickhart started a week after accepting the RNC job – were unusual, and said he thought the RNC finance director should be paid as a full-time employee and not as a consultant.

That the Steele-led RNC loves to waste money is no surprise.  But there’s something else:

One informed Republican said Bickhart was able to command such a salary — equivalent to what he’d made as a private lobbyist and fundraiser — because RNC chairman Michael Steele, embattled from the beginning of his tenure, was finding it difficult to hire experienced fundraising staff.

Isn’t one of the main functions of the RNC and, by extension it’s chairman, to be able to raise money for the party?  And in order to do so, the chairman needs to have the network and the contacts to make it happen?

The spendthrift ways of Steele are not a surprise, at least not to anyone paying attention.

But beyond that, this nonsense just confirms that Steele is completely incompetent for this position.  He can’t handle money.  He can’t find the right people for the basic functions of the party.  What purpose does he serve other than as fodder for people who want reasons to point and laugh at the RNC?

Like I’ve been saying—keep your money away from the national party.  Donate to the conservative candidates you support individually.

Obama: It’s great that the I-Bankers received such huge bonuses

What a difference plummeting poll numbers will make:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.

After a year of failing miserably in trying to appeal to the extremist left-wing of his party with bank taxes, demonizing Wall Street “fat-cats” and siccing his bonus czar on the financial industry, this latest bit from Obama appears to be nothing but posturing.

But posturing to who?  The progressive wing will surely have an aneurism with these comments and conservatives will see it for what it is—a desperate attempt to try and regain some of the political center.  No coincidence, of course, that the President is losing considerable ground with independent voters.  These were the keys to Republican victories in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and the key to Obama’s victory in 2008.  My guess is that the never-ending political campaign in the White House right now realizes this.

What  I find even more interesting is the timing of this interview.  Especially in light of the “savvy” dealings of Goldman Sachs and their role in the recent market anxiety about the potential default of Greece:

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.

[…]

…[I]t looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. “Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future,” one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

That’s some “savvy” work there. 

The markets have calmed down since Monday as the EU is making noise about a rescue package for Greece.  But it’s still an issue, and if the situation there begins to deteriorate, it won’t take long for someone to connect the dots.  How pathetic will the President’s comments look then? 

Obama picked a weird time to suddenly find the virtue in investment bankers’ bonuses.

Jacob Weisberg: Our politicians are awesome, you voters are the idiots

Continuing in the endless line of liberal brains whining about how we’re too stupid to know what’s good for us, Jacob Weisberg decides to jump into the pool.

So many things are wrong with our political system, so many different factors in Democrats failure to get things done.  But the most important factor? 

The American people are just too stupid:

[T]hat list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways clearly hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it.

There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems.

[…]

To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

He then goes on to trash Scott Brown, tea partiers, Ronald Reagan, etc. 

There’s so much fail in this piece, although that’s to be expected.  For example, the polls he’s quoting on the stimulus were taken a year ago, when the country thought they could expect good things to come from the administration.  The stimulus turned out to be a disaster as unemployment ran up to 10%.  The American people soured on it.  Why?

How was the stimulus spent? 

— $233,000 to the University of California at San Diego to study why Africans vote. Jobs created: 12, but seven of those are Africans in Africa.

— In Nevada, $2 million in stimulus money built a new fire station, but because of budget cuts, the county can’t afford to hire firefighters to work there.

— Penn State University got $1.5 million to study plant fossils in Argentina. Of 5 jobs created, 2 belong to Argentines.

— Researchers the State University of New York at Buffalo got $389,000 to pay 100 Buffalonians $45 each to record how much malt liquor they drink — and how much pot smoke each day. Consumption is then reported via an automated phone hotline. Cost per job: almost $200,000.

[…]

Paying people to tell us how much booze they drank and pot they smoked?  Paying Argentines to plant fossils in South America?  And on and on. 

Yes, it’s all becoming clearer now. 

Here’s a clue for Weisberg.  Maybe it’s not so much that our elected leaders are doing something with their power, but what exactly it is their doing.  “Stimulus” sounds great, until the only people being stimulated are some random upstate stoners. 

Same thing with healthcare reform.  I’m sure if you polled some people at any given point in time, I’m sure they’d say that the system needs “reform”.  Supposedly, the Democrats had the “mandate” to do this from the 2008 election, complete with a Congressional super-majority and control of the White House.  It was the perfect storm to reshape healthcare into the liberal utopia the educated class had been dreaming about for decades. 

And what did the rubes get for their faith in these elected “rascals”? 

They got the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase.  We got fake doctors in White House-issued lab coats promising a united front for reform.  We got unions and Obama campaign donors being exempt from a Cadillac-plan tax to fund reform.  But, hey—it’s good enough for us ignorant slobs.  For that, the American people would rather stick with the status quo.

The only issue that the Obama Democrats were intent on pushing, was that Republicans were the reason that healthcare reform was not sailing through a Democratically-controlled White House and Congress.

So why blame the politicians?  It’s us ignorant and amateurish buffoons that don’t know what’s good for us.