Rasmussen polling has never been very friendly to the president, but even they acknowledge that his full month index reached a three-year high in March. And they’re the only polling outfit that still shows Obama with a net negative approval number. Polling from Gallup, Pew Research, ABC News/Washington Post, and CNN/ORC all has the president with an approval number better than fifty percent. Bloomberg has him at 50%-44%. I probably don’t agree with John Hood about much, but I think he’s right about this:
Most voters think Clinton, at least, has relevant experience, which is why she thumps Trump in virtually all head-to-head polls and is heavily favored in the fall. But most Americans are disappointed in the choices before them, and rightly so.
Which is why, I believe, President Obama’s approval ratings are on a bit of an upswing. By comparison, he looks like a leader…
…If you look at poll questions other than presidential approval, you’ll see that the public hasn’t changed its opinion much about the underlying issues. It still disapproves of Obamacare, the president’s handling of foreign policy and the economy, and the country’s general direction. Americans haven’t suddenly become leftists. But some have looked at the presidential race, recoiled in horror, and concluded that President Obama isn’t as bad as they once thought.
They might not mind if he moved into the neighborhood. If the Clintons or the Trumps did, they’d go see a Realtor.
That’s another way of saying that the people would reelect President Obama in a heartbeat if he were allowed to run again. Most people probably wouldn’t have expressed that sentiment a year ago, but seeing the possible replacements has a way of focusing the mind.
So much bullshit has been spread in the fields of our political discourse that even the left seems unappreciative of what the country has had in Barack Obama and his wonderful family.
However, it’s not true that we won’t miss him until he’s gone.
We miss him already.
I definitely will miss him.
And, even more than him..the First Lady…sigh..
I don’t always agree with him but I do respect and trust him. That is a rare combination for a public figure 8 years in.
The lack of any substantial scandal over his 2 terms is underappreciated. The Clintons could learn something from him on that front.
I am convinced he would win a 3rd term by an even wider margin then 2012.
I like the idea of the Democratic nominee proclaiming they will nominate him for the Supreme Court (as part of their convention acceptance speech) using the turtle’s blockade tactic to flip the senate.
Booman writes:
Hell, Booman…I’ve been missing him since I realized he wasn’t who he said he was.
AG
Snappy!
Just the truth of the matter, plainly stated…
AG
I think Hillary Clinton will be a probably do OK, which is really the best you can say about someone who hasn’t set foot in the Oval Office yet.
I know that Barack Obama has been the best President of my lifetime. Not perfect, but a record of one modest success after another[1] with few if any disastrous failures. It’s one of those things that doesn’t sound like much, until you start comparing with the records of other Presidents and see how unusual that is.
[1] And a few not-so-modest successes.
I’m not a huge fan of Obama, and I find it increasingly frustrating that We the People are continuously and endlessly presented with an ever worse rogue’s gallery of so-called “candidates.” I have a ton of issues with Obama and how he chose to govern, and I certainly don’t see him as all that great. In comparison to Trump? Well, really, c’mon. That’s a really LOW LOW bar for comparison. Clinton? Not a much higher bar for comparison, imo.
That said, it’s been totally regrettable how the GOP, how all of the M$M has chosen to treat Obama. It’s beyond putrid. Basically, imo, all this sh*t about Obama’s alleged “divisiveness” and “how DARE he say that” crap boils down to: how DARE this uppity N-word speak to WHITE MEN like that?
Utterly despicable. And no, I, for one, do NOT want Obama to be on the Supreme Court, nor do I feel it’s appropriate for the Democratic nominee to ‘promise’ to put Obama on the Supreme Court. JMHO, of course, others may disagree.
I know my grandmother certainly feels that way, but she never turned sour on him in the first place. She’s been saying she wishes he could run again since 2012. I think she really likes his “no drama” persona and feels “safe because he knows what he’s doing.”
Obviously we disagree on that front to a certain extent, but I’d certainly take him over Clinton — same as it was in 2008.
Democrats always fare poorly because they have to put forward an actual governing agenda. They have to “do things” that invariably gut some sacred cow.
So in a vacuum, they look problematic, but once you compare them to Republicans, they suddenly look a lot more appealing.
I’ve already said except for TPP and drone attacks his FP is pretty solid.
I do want to ask him how treating people as adults worked out for him.
Treating sentient, decent adult humans as adults? Worked out great!
Treating liars and loons as adults? Not so much!
This is my idea of a fair trade agreement. Now that planted pieces on TPP are popping up like mushrooms in the press, Dean Baker has posted a progressive version that leads to enormous economic gains, expands trade, and allows for broadly shared benefits:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/a-trade-deal-for-the-21st_b_9613982.html
I take these end of term polls with a heavy dose of salt. Polls were saying exactly the same thing about Bill Clinton in 2000. (And as that was totally in sync with Bill’s opinion of himself, he’s spent the past sixteen years trying to get there by proxy.) Sure didn’t help his VP in his race against a doofus.
GHWB’s approval ratings were high except for that 1992 window.
Every election is a combination of those the fear change and those that want change. And it’s the job a every new POTUS to make his predecessor look good.
high approval ratings didn’t help him. Gore stupidly distanced himself from Clinton and didn’t even really utilize Clinton as a surrogate. If he had won either his home state or Clinton’s home state Florida wouldn’t have mattered and make no mistake back then Clinton could have easily delivered Arkansas to him. Maybe not as much today in increasingly conservative Arkansas but in 2000 Clinton was a favorite son. They loved the guy, scandals and all. All Gore had to do was let him loose in Arkansas.
ffs — when will partisan DEMs ever acknowledge the facts about 2000. Gore couldn’t have made it clearer in post election disclosures. Gore’s internal polling clearly demonstrated that hugging WJC or worse having WJC on the stump for him, resulted in Gore’s numbers going down. It wasn’t until the last two months of the campaign when Gore was able to sufficiently distance himself from WJC that his numbers improved. The one place where it seemed possible that WJC could be effective was AR — and WJC did campaign for Gore there (something that seems to have been written out of the Clinton lore).
Gore stupidly chose Lieberman for his VP. Gore stupidly created a huge amount of enmity in his primary campaign against Bradley. Gore stupidly ignored NH after the primary that had been ugly. Gore stupidly let himself become a stranger to TN voters during his tenure as VP. Gore did a lot of stupid stuff — but the one you cite was not only not stupid but astute.
Just having Clinton camp out in Arkansas would have done the trick. Had he just flipped that one state Florida would have been a moot point and as someone with a large amount of family throughout the entire state I feel very confident in stating that Clinton could have flipped Arkansas for him.
Upon a bit more reflection, I’ll dial that back to “neglects a huge portion of the history”.
Most important part left out: the Corporate Media’s pervasive malpractice (falling for the idiot Dubya as the guy they’d “rather have a beer with”; lying themselves to invent multiple alleged “lies” by Gore that weren’t in order to promote their chosen herd narrative).
It’s also true that the majority of the public were disgusted by the GOPers’ behavior (impeachment over consensual blowjobs between adults). It’s not self-evident that they were nevertheless so forgiving that campaigning for Gore by The Big Dog would have been an unmixed asset. Bill was quite tainted by then (his high approval was probably mainly an artifact of/response to the public’s disgust with the GOP’s witchhunt), and everybody across the political spectrum knew how and why by that point. It’s not obvious that disgust with the GOP would have necessarily translated to enthusiasm for Gore if only he’d let Clinton campaign for him (though “isn’t it pretty to think so”).
Something appears to be wrong with this thread. Nobody yet has made a snarky comment about 11 dimensional chess.
Obama exhibits an impressive mastery of eleven-dimensional chess. I mean no snark.
We could have tried to repeal the 22nd Amendment, but nobody cared.
President Obama will go down in the top tier of presidents.
Personally I’m against all term limits but that’s a discussion for another time.
Speaking of our Democratic candidates, it’s hard to be Presidential when you’re not President either of them will probably get there.
For once, we got a president who was a better leader and a better man than we deserve as a nation. We’ll not see his like again in a long while, I think.