Voters leave coal in Gray's Christmas stocking

Merry Christmas Mayor Vince! Your approval rating has gone up three points! Put your feet up, have a glass of eggnog, line up some hand dances with the neighbors. Your neighbors might be the ones who bumped up your approval rating. Bad news is it rose from 31 percent in March to 34 percent in a poll released Thursday by the Clarus Research Group. That means more than half of the people polled think you are doing a lousy job. Not so hot, even by Barack Obama standards.

“The mayor let his first year come and go without defining his mayoralty,” says pollster Ron Faucheux, president of Clarus. “He allowed the coverage of cronyism and corruption define him in a very negative way. He must define himself in a positive way.”