Obama’s approval rating the lowest yet. No, really.

For about a year, the professional Obama bashers have kept touting the president’s “plummeting” approval rating, which somehow during all that time, despite its being in “free fall,” has kept hovering between 45 and 42 percent. I must have seen a hundred columns with the headline, “Obama’s Approval Rating Lower Than Ever,” when in fact each poll showed exactly the same approval range as before—between 45 and 42.

Well, the Republicans can finally relax: the latest Zogby poll shows Obama with a 39 percent approval rating, the first time he’s gone below 40. Just think: it took a whole year of Obama’s “plummeting” in “free fall” for him to descend from 44 to 39 percent. That’s 364 days longer than it took the god Hephaestos to fall to the earth when his father Zeus got angry with him and tossed him out of Olympus. As Hephaestos (in Book I of The Iliad) tells the tale to his mother Hera, who is in the middle of an argument with Zeus:

It is too hard to fight against the Olympian.
There was a time once before now I was minded to help you,
and he caught me by the foot and threw me from the magic threshold,
and all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset
I landed in Lemnos, and there was not much life left in me.

Now that’s a free fall worthy of a god.

- end of initial entry -

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

Kim Jong-Il’s Approval Rating Plummets to 120 percent.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

No, his approval rating is not really the lowest yet. The Zogby Internet poll suffers from severe methodological problems. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight wrote this devastating critique of Zogby Internet polls last year. Look at the latest Obama approval chart here at pollster.com. Note that approximately coincident with the Zogby poll, we see approval ratings for Obama at 47 percent (Rasmussen), and 47 percent (Gallup). If you use the “Tools Menu” at the bottom of the chart to limit the date range (horizontal scale) and the percentage range (vertical scale), you will see that since August 2010 Obama’s approval rating has been virtually unchanging at 45 percent. The solid lines on the chart come from using a very sophisticated smoother that filters out the polling fluctuations. The end point of the solid approval line gives Obama a 44.8 percent approval rating. Without Zogby (Internet), Obama would be at about 45 percent. Nothing has changed.

Obama’s base—blacks, Hispanics, women aged 18-45, liberals, and people with advanced degrees—have not deserted him. At this point I’m not optimistic that Obama will be voted out of office in the 2012. If unemployment drops significantly, he will win because the Republicans have not come up with a viable candidate so far. If Palin or Huckabee runs against Obama, they will surely lose.

Jim C. writes:

I’ll bet it’s much lower in reality. People don’t like admitting to a stranger that the unqualified Negro is an utter failure.

You heard it here first: Barry will get his heinie shellacked worse than McGovern

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 23, 2010 10:48 AM | Send