Google “presidential favorability ratings and George W. Bush” and the complete data set of the previous president appears.
Where was W four years ago in the public’s collective esteem?
Eight years ago — at the same point in his first term as Barack Obama is today — George W. Bush’s approval rate was at 47 percent.
Bill Clinton in mid-July 1996? Fifty-seven percent.
Barack Obama is presently at 45 percent.
Bush’s number would never drop below 47 percent through the entire 2004 election season, and in fact it only hit 47 percent on one other occasion.
President Obama must be bracing for even lower numbers as the grinding toll of an unemployment rate, the causes of which he clearly cannot diagnose much less remedy, continues to weigh on his re-election bid.
In October 2004, the nation’s unemployment rate was 5.5 percent. Today’s rate of 8.2 percent will not decline significantly by November and could well tick upward. A 45 percent rating is remarkable only because it is that high, buoyed by a relentless MSM effort to keep eyeballs elsewhere than on that number.
Mitt Romney moved off of his message of economic renewal and job creation on Friday for a weekend news cycle in order to combat the latest slander out of Chicago, but the fundamentals of the campaign won’t be changed by buckets or even dump trucks of slime spewed out by Axelrod and Company.
The election is a referendum on the president’s performance in office, and that performance has been abysmal.
Are there any voters who really and truly care whether Mitt Romney retained an equity ownership in Bain when he went off to turn around a failing 2002 Olympics? Or does calling attention to Romney’s charge up that steep hill actually help the former Massachusetts governor? Given the epic incompetence of senior Obama adviser David Axelrod thus far in this cycle, the odds are that he has once again unwittingly helped Romney, further immunizing him from poison in the campaign water downstream.
The Beltway’s nattering class thinks that if Team Obama sends a message it must be destructive of Romney’s prospects. But when will it dawn on them that the president’s hapless campaign advisers are the same people that came up with Obamacare and the Stimulus, plus the media strategies for the Russian “reset” button, the Queen’s iPod, and Fast and Furious?
The possibility that Axelrod et al might be lousy campaign consultants cuts against a cherished D.C. conceit — that friends and staff of the president must be very smart and very talented — but the reality of the president’s long record of failure doesn’t stop with policy. It extends to politics.
Since his flukish run in 2008, the president and his “A” team have lost Virginia and New Jersey governorship races in 2009, the Scott Brown special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in early 2010, and of course the blowout loss of the House of Representatives and many Senate seats in November of that year.
Now Obama’s on a glide path to Carterland, unemployment is stuck nearly three points above what his team predicted in 2009, and his favorability rating is a dozen points lower than the last Democratic president to seek re-election at a similar point in the cycle.
So indulge the thought, if only for a moment: What if the president’s political instincts are as rotten as his economic moves? What if the Chicago strategy on winning electoral votes was as wisely conceived as the plan to close Gitmo or fund Solyndra?
What if 45 percent is a ceiling and not a floor?
It is hard to take off the Beltway glasses but there is a lot more evidence for concluding the epic incompetence of the president is now manifesting itself in his campaign than there is for believing he and Axelrod are the best and the brightest at work in politics today.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
