President Obama vowed in his State of the Union address in January that he would not stand still.
And he didn’t. In the three months since then, he has fallen.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Tuesday confirmed a trend in other surveys: Mr. Obama’s job approval rating has eroded since January, when he announced that he would embark on a strategy of executive action to bypass a gridlocked Congress.
The poll found that 41 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance — the lowest such rating of his presidency registered in the survey — and 52 percent disapprove. In January, the president’s approval rating was 46 percent in the same survey.
“These numbers are just flat bad for the president,” said Jon McHenry of the Republican polling firm North Star Opinion Research. “For all of his talk about executive action, I don’t think people are seeing actual results.”
On Jan. 28, the day Mr. Obama proclaimed in his speech the plan to use his presidential “phone and pen” more often, the gap in his approval/disapproval ratings on the Real Clear Politics average of polls was minus 8.1 percentage points. After hammering home that theme for the past three months, Mr. Obama’s overall negative rating has grown to minus 9.2 percentage points.
White House officials have not presented the executive-action strategy as a method to boost Mr. Obama’s popularity. Instead, they say, presidential moves such as the one to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors are aimed at achieving policy results for middle-class Americans.
Democratic strategists say another goal is to fire up liberal voters for the midterm elections, when turnout is typically weak.
A White House spokesman declined to comment Tuesday on the polling data.
Click here to continue reading…
SOURCE: Dave Boyer
The Washington Times
BCNN1 WP 