Posted on 08/14/2013 5:38:36 PM PDT by Kaslin
President Obama has fled the White House for the peace and serenity of the beaches and golf links of Martha's Vineyard, leaving behind a mess of polls with failure written all over them.
In the sweltering, dog days of August, Obama has left town for a one week vacation, hoping to escape the many troubles that plague his presidency: a declining economy; his job approval polls in a nose dive; and the latest news that the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the country's direction under his policies.
The Gallup Poll this week shows his job approval marks falling to the low 40s, and "three-quarters of Americans are now dissatisfied" with our country's direction, up sharply from 68 percent in July.
While the news media seem to remind us almost hourly that the Republicans are also unpopular, Gallup's pollsters find that public satisfaction with the Democrats (the people who kill all those House GOP budget cuts) has sunk seven points in this month alone to 37 percent.
"At 22 percent, U.S. satisfaction with the direction of the country is the lowest Gallup has seen since March," the polling organization reported Tuesday.
Obama may be able to temporarily run from his failing grades, but he can't hide from them. More than half of all Americans now disapprove of the job he is doing, and it's not hard to see why.
The economy is not getting stronger in the fifth year of his presidency, it's getting weaker, growing in the last three months by little over 1 percent. "We're still very much living through what amounts to a low-grade depression," writes New York Times economist Paul Krugman, one of Obama's earliest supporters.
Americans are suffering from the dearth of good paying, full-time jobs. "Since January, 833,000 more Americans reported working part- time," while almost 100,000 fewer Americans "have full-time positions," says economist Peter Morici.
Having trouble finding a job? Millions of Americans say they can't find one in Obama's economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 240,000 adults left the labor force and stopped looking for work in July.
Black unemployment was 12.6 percent and Hispanic unemployment is nearly 10 percent. Obama doesn't talk about this which may be why he doesn't vacation in his home state of Illinois where more than 9 percent are out of work.
Throw in higher rents across the country, an average of $3.60 for a gallon of regular gas, a declining stock market that's shrinking worker retirement funds, and one can understand why Americans aren't happy with this president.
The war on terrorism isn't going so well, either. Indeed, Obama dropped President Bush's declared "war on terror" when he became president, hoping to reach out and make nice with the Muslim world.
When that didn't work in his first four years, he ran for re- election insisting al-Qaeda was "on the run" and that its terrorist ranks have been decimated. But events over the past year tell a far different story.
Al-Qaeda has expanded its reach throughout the Middle East and across North Africa, and stepped up its presence and a much more lethal offensive in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead of being "decimated," as we were told, al-Qaeda leaders have been lobbing threats of attacks against the U.S., forcing the White House to shut down nearly twenty embassies abroad, and putting us on a higher alert here at home.
But the growing terrorist threat under Obama's policies of retreat and retrenchment doesn't stop there. In its lead, front page story Tuesday, The Washington Post ran this headline: "Al-Qaeda's Iraq affiliate expands presence in Syria." A subhead states that al-Qaeda is "gaining regional dimensions."
"A rebranded version of Iraq's al-Qaeda affiliate is surging onto the front lines of the war in neighboring Syria, expanding into territory seized by other rebel groups and carving out the kind of sanctuaries that the U.S. military spent more than a decade fighting to prevent in Iraq and Afghanistan," the Post reported.
The widening terrorist insurgency, now calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, "has been bolstered by an influx of thousands of foreign fighters from the region and beyond," the Post said.
Does this sound like al-Qaeda is, as Obama boasted, "on the run"?
Obama assumed the presidency with a foolish laundry list of long outdated and failed liberal ideas, believing he could revive the American economy if he spent enough money on a 1930s-style agenda of public works projects and other federal spending programs.
The result was about $6 trillion in higher debt that didn't restore the economy and unemployment to pre-recession levels. In the fifth year of his failed presidency, hiring is still "sluggish" and the recovery is still "tepid", to quote many of the latest newspaper headlines.
Congress is in no mood to spend more money on his shell game economics that would only throw good money after bad. It's clear that his latest big spending proposals are going nowhere for the rest of his presidency.
Obama seems to know this but won't admit it in public. Last month, he meekly proposed linking new tax reforms to more spending on his job programs. Republican leaders rejected his proposal out of hand.
Now he's become a speech president, delivering "major" addresses around the country, but with no really new ideas or proposals to restore our country to its former greatness.
America is in decline. Confidence in our once-powerful economy is eroding. Americans are dispirited and unhappy about our country's course. We have lost our way.
A new direction awaits a future president with a vision of a newly-ascendant, wealth-creating America.
How many times in the past five years has “this” story been posted?
The minute Obama knows for sure that the game is over, he’ll resign for health reasons and move to a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with us.
I’d say it’s far more likely he’ll become head of the UN and do a nightly stint on PMSNBC.
A declining stock market....hmmmm. The markets still up around historic highs. The author should have left that out, there was plenty of ammo for piling on.
We have to look on the bright side. When he is out of Washington he can do no more harm than he already has done.
The country is so dissatisfied by the direction of the country that they are telling pollsters that they’re ready to annoint Hillary as his successor.
Yes, but he killed Bin Laden. It was a gutsy call they say.
A declining stock market in real terms. The numbers are high only because the Fed keeps creating funny money.
Runaway inflation is but a heartbeat away.
“We have lost our way.”
YOU might have lost your way—the REST of us are being dragged kicking and screaming down a Marxist path we’ve been fighting against for YEARS! Why didn’t you know his Marxist agenda back in 2007?
(not YOU, Kaslin...)
Almost as often as "_______ (fill in politician's name) is toast!"
I agree with your end point, but I said the same thing two years ago and the markets continue to swallow Baraqqi/Bernanke/Lew minibucks at an unlimited rate.
Timing is everything for making money here...
All people need to do is look at Hillary’s husband. Apparently he was never satisfied with the way she handled things. What makes them think she can handle a country?
We are absolutely no better than we were in November 2012. Nothing really has changed from Nov 2012. We still have a half-crocked, incompetent president. Gas stays at nearly $4 per gallon. Inflation is moving along. There are no jobs outside of part-time work. Obamacare is the absolute disaster EVERYONE except Democrats and the corrupt MSM said it would be — and they still reelected Obama.
So why are his poll numbers down now when things are nearly identical to November 2012. It proves Americans are weak-minded, brain-dead, emotionally driven children who are completely disabled from any ability to reason and process thought rationally.
It’s amazing that he’s getting away with saying nothing about the carnage in Egypt, especially while his policy is still supporting the overthrow of Assad in Syria.
Is this another Weiner thread?
Because the corrupt MSM refuses to call Obama on this, or on anything — whatsoever.
Yeah he spent a trillion dollars on his “stimulus” money, but don’t tell me about public works projects. I went to our State Fair last weekend and most of the buildings were built in the 1930s. Every town and city has municipal buildings, post offices, libraries and schools built during that time.
That’s when I thought: One Trillion Dollars, five years ago. Where are the buildings? Where are the dams and bridges? The schools and post offices?
We were ripped off and our kids have to pay the bill. We live in a 3rd world kleptocracy and our crappy media refuses to report it. But people are slowly waking up on their own.
As the dems push hillary and the pubbies roll over and play dead
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