On a FOX News panel Wednesday night, A.B. Stoddard and The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes argued that President Obama had earned his plummeting approval ratings by appearing to give up on the job. Their discussion was sparked by a recent Quinnipiac poll that found Obama the worst president since WWII.
“The president is giving Americans the sense that, as he gives up on Congress, he’s kind of giving up on his job,” The Hill’s Stoddard said. “They know he’s bolting from the building to go to Starbucks and Chipotle. He’s getting bored in the cocoon, he’s planning his post-presidency.”
She noted that Obama has been “having lots of dinner parties where he doesn’t talk about policy or politics, but the NBA playoffs — anything but his job,” adding that this was “very troublesome to the American people.”
Hayes concurred, saying that “It is largely because of the president’s flippant attitude towards the presidency. ‘So sue me’ — what kind of a president would make that argument? And where he had been buoyed, I think, by the fact that people liked him or people wanted him to succeed, despite the fact that they might have had some questions about his policies, that no longer exists, because the president is behaving the way that he’s behaving.”
With his near-constant fundraising, golfing, and vacationing, it seems like Obama has checked out, remaining interested in the trappings of power without wanting to dirty his hands with the actual business of governing.
He isn’t the only one who looks like he has given up. Employment statistics for the month of June show that the economy added 288,000 jobs. While this might seem like a sign of recovery, the number doesn’t show everything. Some 37% of Americans have, like Obama, given up on working. While unemployment lingers around the 6.2% mark, the labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of Americans either working or seeking work, remained steady at 62.8 percent, a low it hit in December. For those inclined to make the President Jimmy Carter comparison, labor force participation hasn’t been this low since 1978.
It seems that Obama really is a man of the people, albeit the non-working ones. It’s too bad most Americans can’t afford to spend their leisure time at the links.
Video via the Free Beacon:
