Here’s the chart from RCP. The spread (Positive - Negative) which was in the 30’s back in April, is down to a new low of 13.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html
It has to be fucking in the mud for it to be a real tree huggin hippy leftist orgy.
It didn’t work out that way for Mr. Hoover.
The Realclearpolitics average (average across all major polls) has him at 54.7, with a disapproval of 41.3. A month ago he was 60/33.
The Rassmussen 3-day tracking poll of likely voters has him at 49 approve / 51 disapprove, although this poll is still an outlier.
Lantern - the data I got for independents comes from the Rassmussen poll, which tracks likely voters and not just the population at large. From that poll:
Sam Stone:
Since you have offered about ten disputable claims in post 39, I’ll just pick one to start with.
You say Obama promised that health care would not “affect any current insurance plans.” This is a claim that has been subject to long debate on this board. It is based on Obama’s promise that, “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
Is that the promise to which you refer? Will you point to the legislation (and I’ll give you a pass on the fact that the legislation is in draft form) that forces people to change doctors or forces people to change health care plans?
Look, there are all kinds of conflicting claims going on in the health care debate. One of the reasons he’s losing support is that very few details have been forthcoming, and people are noticing the contradictions in the broad-stroke claims being made.
In the specific case you mentioned, Obama repeatedly promises that you’ll be able to keep your health plan. And yet, he also wants a public plan to compete with the private plans. The only way a public plan can do that is to be subsidized by taxpayers, and that means private insurers could easily be driven out of the market.
Also, if you have your own non-employer health plan because your employer doesn’t provide a health care plan, your employer will be taxed 8% of payroll to pay into the public system. This means people with their own private plans are about to get an 8% tax increase, which means that employers are going to have a big incentive to sign into the government health plan.
This is SOP for this administration - no, they won’t pass a law taking away your health care plan - they’ll just set up conditions such that your current health care plan costs you more money and/or businesses which don’t take part in the public plan are at a competitive disadvantage with those who do. The net effect is the same.
You can see the same thing with cap and trade. Obama promised not to increase taxes on anyone making under $250,000. But cap and trade IS a tax. It’s applied to businesses, which pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Likewise, the health care tax of 8% on businesses with payrolls over $400,000 which don’t provide health care winds up being a tax on the employees. This tax will apply mainly to small businesses, and the employees of small businesses rarely make over $250,000.
People are starting to notice this stuff. The ‘Paygo’ that Obama said would keep the deficit in check? Turns out he never intended it to apply to entitlements, which are the programs which are actually crashing the budget. And he didn’t intend it to apply to ‘emergency’ spending, so they ignored it for the stimulus package, then used the package to load up liberal pet projects rather than stimulate the economy. Another backdoor way of breaking a promise while sticking to the literal letter of what he said.
Obama said the economy was in crisis, and the stimulus had to be passed immediately to prevent a complete meltdown in the economy. Now he says they didn’t realize how bad it was. In February, the government said even a week’s delay in the stimulus was not acceptable because the money had to get out immediately. Now, he says it’s too early to tell if the stimulus was working because the money was never intended to be spent until next year.
In the meantime, his own budget (before the stimulus) claimed that next year the economy would be growing at 3.2%. No stimulus needed if you’re going to wait that long. The rhetoric used to sell the stimulus was completely at odds with the rhetoric used to justify the budget.
Closing Guantanamo? Well okay, we’ll start the process of closing it, then delay it. In the meantime, they quietly re-affirmed indefinite detention without trial, and are talking about maintaining the program, just not in a place called Guantanamo Bay. So yes, Guantanamo may in fact be closed, but the reason it was hated was not because it was in Guantanamo Bay, but because of the indefinite detentions and lack of transparency. And that, if anything will get worse.
You can get away with stuff like this a few times, but eventually you lose the public’s trust and they simply stop believing what you say. You say you’re going to do something, and the instinctive response becomes, “What’s the catch? Where’s the devil in the details?” Because they know you’re not really being straight with them, even if you’re not literally lying.
I know Barack Obama, sir*. President Hoover was no Barack Obama.
*I don’t know Barack Obama
But then, Hoover developed a reputation for not even trying to do anything to fix things. I expect that trying and failing will get a better response than essentially telling people to sit in a corner and starve quietly. Nor is Obama likely to handle protesting veterans by ordering a cavalry attack upon them.
Sam Stone,
I don’t know if it makes any sense to use a likely voter model this far from any election. The fact that their poll is an outlier doesn’t inspire much confidence in their approach.
Like I said Obama had faded in the polls in the last few weeks but his overall numbers have been clearly better than Clinton and Bush2 and he exceeded that 60 mark for a long time. That suggests to me that if he gets a run of good news either on health care or the economy he could bounce back to that level quite quickly.
I don't think we have an RCP average for Bush's first year but [this](http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob1.htm)has some numbers which suggest that Bush was in the mid-50's by early May. IIRC Clinton had lost popularity even faster. So overall Obama has done fine.Kind of funny.
“Yeah, if everything goes to hell, the President Obama will be pretty unpopular. And since Obama’s a Democrat, things are guaranteed to go to hell. Therefore, Obama will end up hyper-unpopular. Worse than Bush!”
There is talk about taxing healthcare plans above a certain level, but not across the board. Big difference.
Actually, what we need to do is delink health insurance from employment. And the main way to do that is to stop treating it as a non-taxable benefit. I hope by now we all know that is an accident of history. I wish Obama and Congress had the balls to do that, because that is one serious flaw in the whole system.
Let me get this straight: A public plan can’t possibly compete with private plans, and therefore it’ll outcompete them? And even if the public plan does outcompete private plans, how is that something to blame Obama for? If a health insurance company had gone out of business under Bush’s presidency, would you say that Bush was forcing people to give up their health insurance plan?
Again, I’m afraid I’ll have to stick to one claim at a time, if you don’t mind. I’d like to give them a bit deeper treatment than they will get if I try to tackle all of your claims at once.
I understand your argument to be that voters understood Obama’s promise that “*f you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan,” to mean that his public option would not be subsidized in its competition with private plans. Is that correct?
That doesn’t strike me as a fair reading of his words, or a reading voters likely relied upon in choosing him. What would it mean for a public plan not to be subsidized at least in some way? Why would people think Obama was promising a public plan that was functionally identical to existing private plans—what would be the point of such a promise? Obviously a public plan will compete with private plans. That’s the whole point.
I submit that the fairer reading is that this promise comes in a particular political context. It was in rebuttal to the GOP contention that any Democratic health care reform would abolish private insurance. In that context, it seems to be a promise not to abolish private insurance.
I agree that at some point excessive subsidy becomes the equivalent of abolishing private insurance. If such a plan arises (e.g. the plan involves more than just subsidizing the poor, which isn’t going to be a profit-earning technique), then I think you’ll have a point. But AFAIK, the kind of subsidies we’re currently talking about are more like USPS parcel service vs. UPS parcel service–not so extreme that they could be understood as abolishing the private market.
And frankly, why should we care? If a public program works better ( and it almost certainly will ), then let it outcompete the private ones. If the government can keep people alive and healthy more effectively than private industry, that’s more important than indulging a fetish for having the private sector do the job at any cost.
The private insurance sector does not deserve to be preserved, having failed miserably at every goal other than amassing huge profits, and using those profits to buy legislators to preserve those profits. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves that we let these things happen to our fellow citizens, and stood by and did nothing.
Agreed. Healthcare is already subsidized, the only thing is that it doesn’t benefit us that well.
That’s just silliness. We all know Obama isn’t and couldn’t ever really be president, seeing as nobody has ever seen his birth certificate. That is, outside of a few dozen corrupt officials and “experts” and millions of other people on the Internet. But anything that’s on the Internet is just 'shopped.
If the Obamessiah pulls off this hat trick with the health care, a whole lot of people will be going to the doctor, or taking their kids, that couldn’t before. You don’t think they’re likely to remember that, come voting day?
And who fought tooth and nail, hammer and tong, lie and lie, to stop it?
And that damn demographic cuts all the lines: white voters, black voters, latino voters, lesbian latino voters, Southern Baptist lesbian latino voters…
You know, now that I think about it, that 25th Amendment, limiting the President to two terms? Does that really serve any useful function any more, since Bush is gone?
A public plan can’t compete with a private plan unless it is subsidized by taxpayers. With enough taxpayer subsidy, a public plan could be free.
And if your plan is outside your employer right now, then imposing an 8% tax on your employer is essentially charging you double for your health insurance. That is a severe bias against non-employer health care plans, and as John Mace says, we should be trying to decouple health insurance from employment - not tie it to employment even stronger.
Obama also says that he’s not going to interfere with the decisions you and your doctor make, while at the same time he plans to set up a board to examine the efficacy of various treatments and decide what’s most cost-effective. You can bet that the output of that will be used to decide what the government will and won’t pay for, so yes, the government will in fact be sitting between you and your doctor and making decisions about your care.
When some of you think about government-run health care, I’m sure you have a vision of a qualified panel of very smart people working to draft reasonable, responsible rules that optimize efficiency and all that. But the reality is that the plan is drafted by a bunch of non-qualified Senators and Congressmen, each looking out for his or her own agenda. The result is guaranteed to be a mess. For example, they’ve already stripped Obama’s vision of all cost-containing measures - something Obama himself has complained about.
The administration made a big deal about the AMA getting on board - why do you think that is? Because they truly believe this is a great plan? No. They got on board before before they even knew what the plan was. No, the AMA got on board just like Wal-Mart and other special interests did - because if there’s going to be a plan, they want to work as hard as they can to bend it to their own benefit.
I have another quick question: If this plan is going to increase access to health care for 47 million people who currently don’t have it, * where are the doctors and nurses coming from?* The basic law of supply and demand says that if you increase demand and the supply is fixed, the price will go up. But Obama’s promising that the price will come down. How exactly is that supposed to work? How is everyone supposed to get the same or better care than they get today, while 47 million more people are also brought into the system?
I’ve yet to hear a good answer to that question.
Also, one of the biggest problems regarding the cost of medicine in the US today is the cost of defensive medicine that doctors have to practice to protect themselves from lawsuits. Yet this bill does absolutely nothing about this. Some tort reform is seriously needed to bring the cost of medicine down, and it’s totally ignored. Gee, I wonder if that could be because lawyers are one of the biggest constituencies of the Democratic party?
Like the USPS has done with FedEx, UPS, and DHL?