This week’s presidential report card finds President Obama still moving up in the approval ratings despite criticism from former President Bill Clinton, who seems to slip off message to rap the president every time he campaigns for wife Hillary Rodham Clinton. Our graders John Zogby and Jed Babbin seized on different parts of those facts.
John Zogby
Let’s just look at the numbers. President Obama’s overall average approval ratio is 49 percent-46 percent, with some of the leading tracking polls showing him over 50 percent. These are his best numbers in his second term. More Americans are in the workforce and unemployment is at about half the rate it was when he became president January 2009.
A close look at his polling numbers show his support among key demographics to be around (or even slightly higher than) where he was when he won reelection in 2012. If things stay like this he will be in good shape to campaign for his party’s nominee in the fall and generate the kind of turnout the Democrats need to do well. And his opposition’s effort to block consideration of his Supreme Court nominee appears to be slowly coming undone. Love him or hate him, this was a kind week for Mr. Obama.
Grade A
Jed Babbin
In appreciation of Iran’s success in turning Iraq into its satrapy, President Obama sent Secretary of State John Kerry to Bahrain to say Iran should help end the wars in Syria and Yemen. Former President Bill Clinton, having recently said that we needed to recover from the “awful legacy” of the last several years, reminisced that, “Unlike when I became president, a lot of things are coming apart around the world now.” Taking time from his criticism of Donald Trump,
Obama had no comment on the Hillary-Bernie debate on which of them was least qualified to be president.
Nevertheless, Obama had lofty praise for a new IRS rule that aimed to (and did) kill the “inversion” of drug giant Pfizer. Inversions are perfectly legal deals in which U.S. companies domicile themselves abroad by merging with or buying non-U.S. companies in order to avoid the bizarrely high U.S. corporate tax rates, the highest in the civilized world. The new IRS rule penalizes the transactions to the degree of making them impossible. The new rules killed the inversion deal by which by Pfizer, maker of Viagra, was to join with Allergan, an Irish company that makes Botox. Dr. Obama’s stiff support for an unwrinkled version of the new rules was apparently based on his belief that the combination of Pfizer and Allergan would have had the dangerous side effect of causing less taxes to be collected by our government.
Grade D
John Zogby is the senior analyst for Zogby Analytics and author (with Joan Snyder Kuhl) of “The First Globals: Understanding, Managing, and Unleashing our Millennial Generation.” Follow him at @TheJohnZogby
Jed Babbin is an Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him @jedbabbin
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
