As President Barack Obama leaves for Copenhagen this evening to attend the final day of the UN global warming conference, polls show approval of his job performance has cooled.
The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found Obama’s job approval has fallen to 47 percent. NBC News reports:
Underlining the entire poll is a deep dissatisfaction with the current state of the country. Only 33 percent believe the nation is headed in the right direction — an eight-point drop since Obama took office.
While Obama’s approval rating among black Americans hovers around 90 percent, a growing number of African American activists is saying in public what is being said in barber shops and beauty salons.
In a story headlined, “Has Obama Abandoned Blacks?,” the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove reports:
[Danny] Glover is among a growing chorus of African-American opinion leaders who are publicly and privately expressing varying degrees of resignation, disappointment, and outright anger concerning a presidency on which so many hopes have ridden.
Grove picked up on New York Times’ columnist Charles Blow’s comments on MSNBC’s “Hardball”:
There was an expectation, particularly among African Americans, that the first African-American president would at least be vocal about feeling their pain. I think that has not been the case. The president has given a couple of speeches and he has been very heavy on the stick and not very heavy with the carrot… Just in the inability for him to commiserate with that group of people, people feel a bit deflated… He said he’s not going to focus separately on African-American issues at all. That let a lot of people down.
The whispers are getting louder.
