Delusional conservatives getting whipped up again by Obama’s low poll numbers

James N. writes:

Here’s a Free Republic thread (which links to the original Telegraph story) about Obama’s “rock bottom” poll number of 41 percent approval.

A few observations:

1. Ronald Reagan had 41 percent approval in 1983, the year before his 49-state landslide.

2. Obama has had approval numbers like this frequently, there is no significant trend to the numbers.

3. IF IT’S TRUE that 41 percent of the U.S. population in some manner “approve” of Obama, we have a social and political crisis of enormous proportions.

LA replies:

You are right on all points. The conservatives are delusional about this. Today at Lucianne.com, Lucianne Goldberg headlines the same column in the Must Reads:

A floundering presidency heading for a fall?
Barack Obama hits rock bottom in latest Gallup poll
Even the Brits are in awe.

That editorial note, “Even the Brits are in awe,” suggests that the Brits in question are detached observers who up to this point have not been impressed by Obama’s troubles, but now his troubles are getting so bad that “even” the Brits are awed by them. In fact, the story linked by Lucianne is by Nile Gardiner of The Telegraph. All that Gardiner does, in his every column, is bash Obama. That’s his whole job, along with his Telegraph colleague, Toby Harnden. The sole assignment of these two “reporters” is to keep saying, “Obama is a disaster, Obama is failing, Obama is finished.” Lucianne, who posts every one of Gardiner’s and Harnden’s columns, thinks or would have her readers think that these Brits are objective, authoritative observers whose view of U.S. politics is more sound and reliable than that of the U.S. media, when in fact they are one-note hacks who if Obama ate cold cereal would say, “Obama is a disaster, he doesn’t know how to eat cereal, his poll numbers are in free fall.”

Here is a previous piece I’ve written about Harnden’s “journalism.” See also my entry from June 2010, “The meaningless and unreadable anti-Obama commentators”:

Here, by Wesley Pruden, is a typical example of the unreadable Obama-bashing columns and editorials that gush forth daily from such conservative outlets as the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, Investor’s Business Daily, American Pseudo-Intellectual Ranter (a.k.a. American Thinker), and Toby Harnden’s several-times-a-week dose of kneejerk anti-Obamism in the Telegraph. Such writings do not inform, they do not persuade, they do not present reasoned arguments about Obama in particular or political issues in general. Nor, for the most part, do they even say that Obama is bad. They just keep telling us, over and over, “Obama’s screwing up,” “Obama’s not up to the job,” “Obama can’t do anything right,” “Obama’s a loser,” “Obama’s going down in the polls,” “Obama’s doomed,” “No one likes Obama,” “No one respects Obama,” “Obama’s screwing up,” “Obama’s not up to the job,” “Obama can’t do anything right,” “Obama’s a loser,” “Obama’s going down in the polls,” “Obama’s doomed,” “No one likes Obama,” “No one respects Obama … ”

Steadily filling and poisoning the conservative mind the way the oil spill is filling and poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, this brainless outpouring of Schadenfreude, worthy of riled-up and ill-mannered sports fans cheering the bad fortune of the other team, suggests the opposite of a conservative movement that is ready for intellectual leadership in the event that the Democrats lose control of the Congress and the White House over the next two years.

In a comment I added this qualification:

Of course I don’t mean that all Obama-critical articles at the publications I mentioned fit my description. But many of them do. And the production of them is continuous. I’ve never seen such herd-like writing on the right.

- end of initial entry -

Shrewsbury writes:

What Shrewsbury finds annoying about presidential-popularity polls is that they don’t ask whether the responder thinks the president is governing too far to the left or too far to the right. In a country with a sharp ideological divide, a statement of mere “disapproval” doesn’t tell us very much. If Obama’s numbers are sinking, that might merely reflect a growing disenchantment with him on the left, which hardly translates into votes for Trump/Paul or even Romney/Snowe in ‘12.

A science-fiction scenario. The United States of Diversity, 2100: white population 30 percent, nonwhite population 70 percent. The white-persecuting President Camacho has a zero percent approval rating, but is reelected in a landslide over a candidate who does not want to persecute whites so much. How did this happen? It happened because the whites disapproved of him for persecuting white people, while the nonwhites disapproved of him for not persecuting white people nearly enough.

David B. writes:

Two years ago, I wrote at VFR that Obama would never fall much below 44-45 percent in his approval rating. This was due to unanimous support from blacks, heavy approval by Hispanics, along with white liberals who love having a black president.

If 41 percent is Obama’s present rating, things haven’t changed that much. As mentioned, Reagan’s numbers were similar a year before his 1984 landslide. It is forgotten by most conservatives that Reagan had lower numbers during most of his first term than Obama’s have been.

On the one hand, it is a sign of how bad things are that Obama has as high a rating as he does. On the other, a 41 percent rating for Obama is unimpressive if you consider his almost universal backing in the media and the culture in general.

Furthermore, will Obama have a credible opponent in 2012?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 16, 2011 10:19 AM | Send