Today’s Washington Times featured an editorial exposing one aspect of Barack Obama’s poll numbers the mainstream media gloss over — his startling unpopularity:
President Obama’s media cheerleaders are hailing how loved he is. But at the 100-day mark of his presidency, Mr. Obama is the second-least-popular president in 40 years.
According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969…
…The explanation for Mr. Obama’s low approval is that he ran as a moderate but has governed from the far left. The fawning and self-deceiving press won’t go there. On Sunday’s "Meet the Press," host David Gregory asked a panel about critics who "would say one of the things that he’s done in 100 days already is expand the role of government, the size of government." Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed, "That’s what he ran for the presidency in the first place for."
Perplexed about complaints over Mr. Obama’s expansion of government, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham asked: "does no one listen during campaigns?"
It was these pundits who weren’t paying attention during last year’s campaign. In all three presidential debates, Mr. Obama promised to cut government spending and reduce the size of the deficit. He blamed the economic crisis on excessive deficits. At no time did candidate Barack Obama say that more deficit-spending was the solution.
The Times is absolutely right. Americans are angry and fed up over Washington politicians who think they can tax and spend and borrow their way to prosperity. Many voted for Obama thinking he had the policies to get our free market economy moving again — only to see him try and claim getting 53% of the vote was a mandate for socialism.
If the hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans taking time off from their job and home obligations to protest Obama’s socialist policies wasn’t a wake-up call, perhaps his plummeting poll numbers will be.
Americans are looking for a party and elected officials who know that government impedes prosperity, and that restoring America’s promise means getting government out of the way. No wonder more and more people are joining the Libertarian Party for the first time.
