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Michael Barone posts on the public trust that has been lost by this president.
During all of his first term, even as his job approval ratings tumbled in 2010 and 2011, more voters expressed positive than negative personal feelings toward Barack Obama. This was a source of strength that helped him overcome opposition to some of his policies, notably Obamacare, in the 2012 presidential election.
But now voters seem to be souring on him personally. Evidence comes from the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday. It shows the percentages expressing “very” or “somewhat” positive feelings and “very” or “somewhat” negative feelings toward Obama in NBC/WSJ polls going back to February 2009. In the following chart I set out the averages of those expressing positive and negative feelings over stated periods.
It’s a pretty clear picture. Throughout the campaign year, 49 percent of people had favorable feelings to Obama, a number basically mirrored in the 51 people of the popular vote he won in November. Between the election and his second inaugural ceremony, Obama enjoyed a somewhat higher personal rating, an afterglow, as tends to happen when a president is re-elected. Through the first nine months of 2013 more voters express positive than negative feelings, though by a slightly reduced margin as compared to the campaign year. Then, in mid-October, as the fiasco of the Obamacare rollout reverberated and Obama was forced to admit that his promise that you could keep your insurance and your doctor were false, something snapped. Then, a plurality had negative feelings and only 42 percent expressed positive feelings.
How does a president re-establish the bonds of trust with most voters after they have snapped? That’s a question facing Barack Obama right now.
Editors of the Orange County Register call Sebelius a serial liar.
Sebelius keeps revising her script on the success of the Affordable Care Act.
Every time Kathleen Sebelius testifies before Congress, President Obama’s secretary of health and human services reminds us why she is unfit for her Cabinet post: She is a serial dissembler.
The latest example is her appearance this week before the House Ways and Means Committee. …
Dana Milbank on why the millennials have abandoned the administration and will cause the collapse of healthcare legislation.
The day before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, I wrote about the massive crowds of young people at Barack Obama rallies, noting that his candidacy would collapse “if they don’t show up.”
The next night, after Obama’s victory celebration in Des Moines, Obama strategist Steve Hildebrand spotted me in a crowd. “The kids showed up!” he said fiercely.
They did. But where are they now?
An army of 15 million voters under 30 swept Obama past Hillary Clinton and John McCain and to the presidency in 2008. More than 12 million helped him return in 2012. But now his presidency is on the line — and the Obama youth are abandoning him in his hour of need.
The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act. …
Jay Sekulow writes on the “impossible enforcement of an unworkable law.”
Does “ObamaCare” truly exist? Are we actually living with the law that was passed with so much fanfare four years ago?
I had to ask myself that question while reviewing the New York Times list of unilateral ObamaCare changes, a list that chronicles ObamaCare’s utter failure. Some highlights:
- A one year delay to the employer mandate.
- An additional year delay for medium-sized businesses.
Even the ideologues at HHS understand that the law won’t work, that it can’t work, and that the American people simply won’t stand for its full implementation.
- A one year grace period (no, make that three years) for non-compliant plans.
- Partial exemptions from the individual mandate.
The list can (and does) go on, and it doesn’t even include the recent, significant change to the Individual Mandate that the Wall Street Journal says “quietly repeals the individual purchase rules for two more years.”
How? By broadening the “hardship” exemptions significantly and then requiring proof of hardship by documentation only “if possible.”
In other words, if you claim hardship, it looks like the Obama administration is planning to take your word for it. …
Peter Wehner says the president is a “one man wrecking ball.”
By now it’s settled on most people, including Democrats, that the loss of Alex Sink to David Jolly in Florida’s 13th Congressional District was, in the words of the New York Times, “devastating” to Democrats. It’s a district Ms. Sink carried in her unsuccessful race for governor against Rick Scott, a district that Barack Obama carried in his two elections, and a district that demographically now favors Democrats. In addition, Ms. Sink raised more money and ran a better campaign than Jolly. Even Bill Clinton lent his efforts to her campaign. And yet she lost.
What should particularly alarm Democrats is that Ms. Sink, who was not in Congress in 2010 and therefore did not cast a vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act, ran what Democrats considered a “textbook” campaign when it came to dealing with ObamaCare. She said she wanted to fix it, not repeal it; and she attempted to paint Jolly as a right-wing extremist on abortion, Social Security privatization, and in wanting to repeal ObamaCare. And yet she lost.
Even someone as reflexively partisan as Paul Begala said Democrats shouldn’t try to spin this loss.
But there’s another, broader point worth making, I think. It is that Barack Obama, who was the embodiment of liberal hopes and dreams, is turning out to be a one-man political wrecking ball when it comes to his party–and to liberalism more broadly. …