The decline in Barack Obama's popularity since July has been the steepest of any president at the same stage of his first term for more than 50 years. Barack Obama's popularity has fallen steeply since being elected last year.
Gallup recorded an average daily approval rating of 53 percent for Mr. Obama for the third quarter of the year, a sharp drop from the 62 percent he recorded from April. His current approval rating - hovering just above the level that would make re-election an uphill struggle - is close to the bottom for a newly-elected president.
Mr. Obama entered the White House with a soaring 78 percent approval rating. The bad polling news came as Mr. Obama returned to the campaign trail to prevent his Democratic party losing two governorships next month in states in which he defeated Senator John McCain in last November's election.
Jeffrey Jones of Gallup explained: "The dominant political focus for Obama in the third quarter was the push for health care reform, including his nationally televised address to Congress in early September." - Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: Bad luck?
Free-Market Analysis: We sometimes get emails asking about our stance regarding the Internet. We have pointed out many times that we believe the Internet to be something akin to the Gutenberg press, and that it is having a similar impact. The Gutenberg press - in revealing through the printed bible just how far the Roman Catholic Church had departed from the appropriate theology - set the stage first for the Reformation and then for a series of even larger societal transformations.
It may seem like a relatively minor occurrence given the magnitude of the Reformation, but the relative speed with which Barack Obama's poll numbers have plummeted are worthy of comment within the larger paradigm we propose. Without the Internet, there would have been no way of analyzing what Obama has presented and much of the opposition to Obama's various socialized programs would have been far slower to materialize.
One only has to look at the slow decline of say Franklin Delano Roosevelt's popularity - he of similar programs of socialization - to realize how fast these processes are today, especially in America. Obama has been savaged on numerous fronts regarding the fuzzy math his administration indulges in, and his slippage is noteworthy given the tremendous positives that he arrived with.
There is more, also attributable to the Internet in our opinion. Surveys we have read (and commented on) are showing that increased numbers of Americans are dissatisfied with the political process in general. Up to 50 percent of Americans - and many Europeans too in our opinion - are unhappy with governmental processes and seeking answers that government is apparently not providing.
Conclusion: We see the above trends accelerating over time. That's how education works. The modern Western structure of politics, economics and military action is under sustained attack, not merely by disgruntled fringes but by a good cross-section of middle class citizens. Those readers who wish to do so are free to interpret this growing trend as one of serendipity. We believe it has everything to do with the conversation on the Internet, which is increasingly one of freedom in a world of out-of-control monetary stimulation (bankrupting the middle class) and taxes that deprive citizens of upwards of 50 percent of their income with little gained in return.
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