Posted by
Kenneth Hanson on Monday, April 06, 2009 7:46:19 PM
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1178/polarized-partisan-gap-in-obama-approval-historic
In a newly released Pew Research poll, Obama is now the most polarizing early term president of the modern era. While Obama continues to be personally popular, there is also growing unrest with his radical policies. In Europe, he was treated like a rock star, but got absolutely nothing that he sought from the G-20 leaders – a total strike out.
Polls show that in this country an overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned or downright in opposition to Obama’s policies such as growing government, increasing spending, etc. with overwhelming opposition in some areas. There is a striking disconnect between Obama’s personal popularity and agreement with his policy proposals and actions to date.
Not helping Obama’s cause is that Nancy Pelosi’s unfavorable rating has skyrocketed to 60%, with 42% rating her “very unfavorable”. That is an astonishingly high unfavorable rating.
To bolster his cause, the Obama administration has resurrected the Clinton White House’s approach of polling and focus group testing every phrase and message. To this day I firmly believe that Bill Clinton had no strongly held beliefs or principles from which he governed. He just wanted to be popular and to be a two term president. Bush got rid of all this nonsense. He didn’t need it since he believed in what he was doing and governed from a strong set of principles and did not govern according to popularity polls. With Obama, he also has deeply held principles and beliefs. But since his agenda is largely disconcerting to the center-right majority, he needs to focus group test and poll test the semantics in order to obfuscate his true intent.