President loses public confidence

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The American public simply is not "buying" the unsound plans that the Obama administration is "selling" to pull the country out of the current economic crisis.

Support for President Barack Obama's handling of the economy plunged to its lowest level ever in a recent Associated Press-GfK poll.

Only 41 percent of more than 1,000 adults surveyed nationwide said they approve of how the president is handling the economy. Far more respondents - 56 percent - disapprove.

In an equally telling statistic, more than three-fifths - 61 percent - said the economy has gotten worse or at best stayed the same under Obama's supervision.

Rather than accept responsibility and acknowledge that the policies he promotes are actually harming the nation's economy, the president is giving speeches blaming Republicans almost exclusively for the crisis and declaring that Democrats have the right medicine for the sick economy.

"We're on the right track. The economy is getting stronger," he said in a recent speech - defying results from the same poll that suggest more than 80 percent of Americans believe the economy is in poor or very poor shape.

What's more, the president's unwillingness to take responsibility for the faltering economy - and his insistence that it's pretty much all the Republicans' fault - is a bizarre rewriting of history.

There is no question that too many Republicans have gone along with outrageous spending. It is certainly fair to fault them for that. But Democrats have had majorities in both houses of Congress for almost four years now - since even before Obama took office. They have controlled the purse strings, particularly during the past two years after they expanded their congressional majorities to overwhelming margins in the 2008 elections.

If Democrats' economic policies were going to make a positive difference, they should have done so after nearly four years. But major so-called legislative "successes" under Democrat rule - such as ObamaCare socialized medicine and the $862 billion "stimulus" - have instead bloated the unsustainable size of the federal government while failing to hold down unemployment. Joblessness is in the painful range of almost 10 percent, and week after week, truly alarming numbers of Americans are having to seek unemployment benefits for the first time.

"The economy is on life support," the general manager of a carpet store in Columbia, Mo., told the AP. The manager, Scott Bradley, voted for Obama in 2008 but said he would not do so again. "Obama's policies are making the economy worse," he added.

Unfortunately, we have not seen the last of those policies. Democrats in Congress - with the president's backing - plan to raise taxes in January. That will further discourage the business investment and expansion that the United States desperately needs to pull out of the recession.

It is little wonder that the American people - who were promised much by Obama when he was running for president - have overwhelmingly lost confidence that he can help our struggling economy.