Rasmussen shows the trajectory of President Obama’ popularity. Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie in the WaPo provide a potential explanation:

Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike…

while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor’s big government policies and perpetual crisis mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.

Beyond pushing the “emergency” $787 billion stimulus package (even while acknowledging that the vast majority of funds would be released in 2010 and beyond), Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill and a $106 billion supplemental spending bill to cover “emergency” expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, improbably, a “cash for clunkers” program). Despite pledges to achieve a “net spending cut” by targeting earmarks and wasteful spending, Obama rubber-stamped more than 9,000 earmarks and asked government agencies to trim a paltry $100 million in spending this year, 0.003 percent of the federal budget…

Obama seems to believe that saying one thing, while doing another, somehow makes it so. His first budget was titled “A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility,” even as his own projections showed a decade’s worth of historically high deficits. He vowed no new taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then jacked up cigarette taxes and indicated a willingness to consider new health-care taxes as part of his reform package. He said he didn’t want to take over General Motors on the day that he took over General Motors.

Such is the extent of Obama’s magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn’t even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of “providing the American people more transparency in government.”…

Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they’ll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility. That the administration is now spending millions of dollars to revamp its useless stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov is one more indication that, post-Bush, the White House still thinks of citizens as marks to be rolled…

Shrinkwrapped provides some possible explanations for the yawning disconnect between Obama’s words and his actions — actions that are often precisely the opposite of what the President just said moments before. We don’t know which explanation is correct.

However, we’ve not seen anything quite like this fellow Obama. We’re not talking about policy — the Obama agenda could come from a sociology lecturer at any of America’s fine junior colleges (or Harvard or Berkeley for that matter.) What distinguishes Obama is that he talks utter claptrap at times and he seems to genuinely believe it as he says it, despite its being rubbish. We would find it hard to say the things Obama says, and keep a straight face. On the other hand, Obama’s self-regard and lack of apparent self-awareness seem to be stratospheric, so maybe he thinks that his words are in some sense true if it is he who is saying the words.

Question: which would be worse, (a) that Obama really believes the foolish and transparently false things he says at the moment he utters the words; or (b) that Obama knows that what he is saying is rubbish, but figures he can get away with it?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 7:02 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Polling, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.