19 June 2009

Obama Remains Popular

Two new polls show strong job approval ratings for President Obama:
Pew Research:
Approve 61%
Disapprove 30%
No opinion 9%

NY Times/CBS News:
Approve 63%
Disapprove 26%
No opinion 11%
These are excellent numbers, however if you dig deeper you will find that Americans are starting to move blame for the economy from the Bush administration to Mr. Obama. My hunch is the president's approval rating will be down near 50% by Labor Day. American's have short attention spans and tend to want quick fixes to everything. Getting the worst economy since the Great Depression back on track is going to take some time (I predict two years or so). And President Obama is going to have to ride out the inevitable resulting low poll numbers.

Update: For reference, five months into his first term Bill Clinton's approval rating was 37%.