Last week, President Obama’s job approval rating sank to 46 percent in a Gallup poll, matching the lowest weekly job approval rating of his presidency. Few Americans were surprised. Obama’s bumbling response to the BP oil spill drove the latest decline in his popularity almost equally among Democrats, Republicans and independents.
But another Gallup poll taken about the same time contained even worse news for the president. After a year and a half of “hope and change,” 49 percent of Americans consider the Democratic Party “too liberal” — compared with 39 percent in 2008, when Obama was elected. This is 1 percentage point below the all-time high Gallup recorded since it first began asking such trend questions in 1992. That high-water mark came in 1994, the year of the last Republican landslide. That year, Democrats lost 10 percent of their vote share among working-class people making less than $30,000 per year. Blue-collar disenchantment with President Clinton during his first term, particularly his attempt to pass unpopular federal health care legislation, helped catapult the GOP into a House majority for the first time since 1954.
