Wednesday, December 23, 2009

UK Press Gives Obama an “F” for His Historically Low Approval Rating

Nile Gardner at The Telegraph reported on the historically unpopular president.

The Telegraph wades into waters off limits for the American state-run media.

Barack Obama gave himself a B+ on Oprah Winfrey’s White House Christmas Special on ABC, but the American public is far less generous. The latest influential Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of likely US voters gives Obama a thumping 56 percent disapproval rating – an F grade by any measure. 46 percent strongly disapprove of the president’s job performance, while just 25 percent strongly approve. That’s a Presidential Approval Index rating of -21 percentage points, a staggering figure for a president just 11 months into his term of office.

These are historically low approval ratings for a US president, that concur with those released by several other pollsters, including NBC News/Wall Street Journal, who recently reported a 47 percent approval for Obama, and Quinnipiac and Marist, both at 46 percent.

The latest Gallup Survey gives Obama just 50 percent approval, lower than any president in the first December of his first term in the post-war period, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in 1981, at 49 percent, who inherited a country literally brought to its knees by the Carter presidency before later restoring it to greatness. Reagan eventually left office with a 68 percent approval.

At the same stage of their presidencies, George W. Bush polled at 81 percent approval, John F. Kennedy at 77 percent, George H.W. Bush at 71 percent, Dwight Eisenhower at 69 percent, Richard Nixon at 59 percent, Jimmy Carter at 57 percent, and Bill Clinton at 53 percent.

gatewaypundit.firstthings.com

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