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“With little media notice, Obama’s poll numbers sink”

Unexpectedly!

Faced with a messy record of administration scandals and investigations and his ineffectiveness as a political leader to do much beyond blame others, Obama’s important national leadership rating has fallen to its lowest level in more than a year.

And while Obama himself need never face voters again and Congress’ approval is even lower, his professed political goal on numerous fundraising trips this year is to preserve the slim Democrat Senate majority and restore the House to his party’s control in next year’s midterm elections.

That’s no easy achievement since either or both political goals fly in the face of an historical pattern of losses for the party controlling the White House in second term midterm balloting. Sunken poll numbers would complicate the Chicagoan’s sales challenge.

He’s also plagued by growing signs that implementation of his trademark ObamaCare health takeover is unmanageable and beyond the federal government’s technical capacity to manage such that crucial parts are being delayed, despite scores of millions spent on selling enrollments.

And by damage among financially hard-pressed families from steady congressional Republican attacks over Obama reneging on his pledge to halt the doubling of student loan interest rates on July 1. The GOP-controlled House had approved legislation to maintain the existing 3.4% rate.

A new Rasmussen Reports survey of likely voters said only 43% of Americans now considers the Democrat an excellent or good leader. That’s down from 55% late last year and 49% as recently as last month.

When he took office in January of 2009 before not creating the promised number of new jobs and before imposing ObamaCare on the country, fully 60% considered Obama an excellent or good leader. Back then, only 14% thought of him as a poor leader; today, he’s grown that number to 38%.

Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll finds Obama hovering recently in the 48%-50% approval range, while his Strongly Disapprove total also holds steady, at a significant 38%.

— Once again proving my point that roughly 60 % of Americans are either asleep, confused, or functioning morons.  God bless ’em!

24 Replies to ““With little media notice, Obama’s poll numbers sink””

  1. Squid says:

    It’s hard to force yourself to realize that you’ve been conned. I’d feel sorry for these suckers, except that all they’ve been conned out of are my freedom and my money. So fuck ’em.

  2. Shermlaw says:

    I doubt he’s worried about Congressional elections that much, given that he’s discovered the ability to simply create laws himself or ignore those passed by congress. My guess is that he’ll probably concentrate on finding out the identities of those disaffected with his leadership style for, you know, “outreach” efforts. Like IRS/EPA/DOJ ad nauseum “intervention.”

  3. It’s hard to force yourself to realize that you’ve been conned.

    True — but when it’s no longer possible to deny it, the mark always gets pissed at the conman, not themselves.

    Which bodes ill for, basically, everybody in D.C.

    Win-win!

  4. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I’d feel sorry for these suckers, except that all they’ve been conned out of are my freedom and my money. So fuck ’em.

    .

    It’s easy to be a sucker when you either don’t have a personal stake in the outcome, or you’ve bought into the notion that the outcome is all upside for you.

  5. dicentra says:

    It’s hard to force yourself to realize that you’ve been conned.

    “It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” —Mark Twain

  6. JHoward says:

    With little media notice, this isn’t helping. Reality bites:

    Labor unions are among the key institutions responsible for the passage of Obamacare. They spent tons of money electing Democrats to Congress in 2006 and 2008, and fought hard to push the health law through the legislature in 2009 and 2010. But now, unions are waking up to the fact that Obamacare is heavily disruptive to the health benefits of their members.

    Last Thursday, representatives of three of the nation’s largest unions fired off a letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, warning that Obamacare would “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

    The letter was penned by James P. Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; Joseph Hansen, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union; and Donald “D.” Taylor, president of UNITE-HERE, a union representing hotel, airport, food service, gaming, and textile workers.

    “When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act,” they begin, “you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat…We have been strong supporters of the notion that all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. We have also been strong supporters of you. In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure this vision. Now this vision has come back to haunt us.”

    ‘Unintended consequences’ causing ‘nightmare scenarios’

    The union leaders are concerned that Obamacare’s employer mandate incentivizes smaller companies to shift their workers to part-time status, because employers are not required to provide health coverage to part-time workers. “We have a problem,” they write, and “you need to fix it.”

    “The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe,” they continue. “Perverse incentives are causing nightmare scenarios. First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.”

    What surprises me about this is that union leaders are pretty strategic when it comes to employee benefits. It was obvious in 2009 that Obamacare’s employer mandate would incentivize this shift. Why didn’t labor unions fight it back then?

    Regulations will ‘destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members’

    The labor bosses are also unhappy, because of the way Obamacare affects multi-employer health plans. Multi-employer plans, also called Taft-Hartley plans, are health insurance benefits typically arranged between a labor union in a particular industry, such as restaurants, and small employers in that industry. About 20 million workers are covered by these plans; 800,000 of Joseph Hansen’s 1.3 million UFCW members are covered this way.

    Taft-Hartley plans, they write, “have been built over decades by working men and women,” but unlike plans offered on the ACA exchanges, unionized workers will not be eligible for subsidies, because workers with employer-sponsored coverage don’t qualify.

    Obamacare’s regulatory changes to the small-group insurance market will drive up the cost of these plans. For example, the rules requiring plans to cover adult children up to the age of 26, the elimination of limits on annual or lifetime coverage, and the mandates that plans cover a wide range of benefits will drive premiums upward.

    But the key problem is that the Taft-Hartley plans already provide generous and costly coverage; small employers now have a more financially attractive alternative, which is to drop coverage and put people on the exchanges, once the existing collective bargaining agreements are up. That gives workers less reason to join a union; a big part of why working people pay union dues is because unions play a big role in negotiating health benefits.

    So the labor leaders are demanding that their workers with employer-sponsored coverage also gain eligibility for ACA subsidies. Otherwise, their workers will be “relegated to second-class status” despite being “taxed to pay for those subsidies,” a result that will “make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable” and “destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.”

    “You pledged.”

    And we laughed and laughed and laughed.

  7. leigh says:

    JHo, “You fucked up, you trusted us” says Obama to the Labor leaders.

  8. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Hoffa, Hansen and Taylor are laughing too. That rubes-self-identifying bit there is to keep the real rubes from figuring out for whom Hoffa, Hansen, and Taylor really work.

    Because we who are laughing and laughing and laughing need to remember that the solution to the problem that is Obamacare is single-payer national health insurance.
    Like they have in Europe.

  9. mondamay says:

    functioning morons

    Meaning “capable of filling out the necessary paperwork to live life on the government dole, but not much else”?

  10. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Doesn’t the state pay other people to help with that?

  11. Scott Hinckley says:

    Once again proving my point that roughly 60 % of Americans are either asleep, confused, or functioning morons. God bless ‘em!

    I’m going with functioning morons. Except for the 25% or so that are are actual thieving goons.

  12. JHoward says:

    the solution to the problem that is Obamacare is single-payer national health insurance.

    Exactly right…a principle that applies across the board.

    These people are so good at It’s What They Do; It’s Who They Are (© Outlaw, Inc.) that as with all severe dysfunctionals, they’ll come roaring back — think Tony Weiner — to Overcome™ all the unfortunate adversity and all the problematic realities wrought by their own malfeasance in order to strive forward to the promised Utopia nonetheless.

    This too is what they do: When you are built of lying dysfunction you come to see it as the natural fabric of everything around you, and what better war to wage than that against…everything around you. They never met a crisis they couldn’t rescue from going to waste.

    All this crisis needs is some just-in-time rework to magically reappear after the election. When it’ll be EO’d back into existence or something, simultaneously acceptable to these temporary detractors and rightly seen as catastrophic by normal people.

    But what counts is the resplendence. The restoration. That Brave New World. Words and phrases like this were made for our luminous Progressive times. We shall overcome.

  13. mondamay says:

    Ernst Schreiber says July 15, 2013 at 11:53 am

    Doesn’t the state pay other people to help with that?

    I didn’t get any help with my FAFSA (the only state or federal “help” I’ve ever received[thanks to the Feds killing off private student loans]), and I know that for a long time the Obamacare people were reporting only 8000 applicants for preexisting conditions, which was much fewer than expected, so I’m guessing usually, “no”.

    It takes a lot of hard work and forms to be an ignorant, dependent bum.

  14. Squid says:

    Just because there were only 8,000 applicants doesn’t mean the State didn’t hire 800,000 “helpers” to assist them with their forms…

  15. mondamay says:

    I probably said it wrong. Only 8000 enrolled.

    6 million likely eligible, but only 8000 enrolled (at the time). Yes it doesn’t prove there isn’t an army waiting to help, but it does corroborate it somewhat.

  16. mojo says:

    Couldn’t be because he’s a punk-ass douchebag, could it?

  17. Squid says:

    Those six million are a community that needs to be organized, no matter how many community organizers we have to hire to make it happen.

  18. RI Red says:

    Hey, guys and gals! I just woke up from this unbelievable dream where the country elected a “community organizer” for President. Hahahahahahaha! Can you imagine that? Maybe the dream came as an after-effect of all that juicing I’ve been doing.

  19. dicentra says:

    Hewitt’s following up his “this trial is meaningless” with “there won’t be any rioting, and black people aren’t furious” slog up the Nile.

    Switched right over to Levin.

    HH is getting worse and worse. Fortunately, the tribbles are mad at him, too.

  20. sdferr says:

    Hubert Humphrey, on the other hand, can’t get any deader than he already is.

  21. cranky-d says:

    I stopped listening to any Hewitt when he took it all behind a paywall (I refuse to listen to live radio with all those friggin commercials). I guess I’m not missing much except for the Mark Stein interviews.

  22. SBP says:

    “Because we who are laughing and laughing and laughing need to remember that the solution to the problem that is Obamacare is single-payer national health insurance.”

    Sure. Along with single-payer food, single-payer housing, and a controlled artificial breeding program in which the gonads are removed and harvested at puberty, just to make sure no one gets sexually harassed.

  23. Pablo says:

    Wait until we get to single-payer justice.

  24. palaeomerus says:

    God kings.

Comments are closed.