A year ago today, Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Obama’s supporters left Invesco Field “fired up, ready to go.”
A year later, President Obama’s job approval rating is 50 percent and his supporters are “wee-weed up.”
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote:
It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.
More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.
As for Obama’s supporters having “nowhere else to go,” Obama voters in, say, Virginia and New Jersey may decide to go to the mall rather than their polling place in November.
Obama may not have lost his mojo, but it ain’t working on a broad cross-section of Americans, according to Gallup’s weekly poll.
Among black Americans, Obama’s job approval is 91 percent, down from 96 percent at the beginning of August.