I have to admit, while I opposed him in the election I had hoped my concerns over President Obama’s inexperience and far left tendencies would not be a major handicap for the man. Sadly, I was right – the President’s naive team has pretty much wasted all his political capitol and he and the Democrats are heading into a fall of disappointment and eroding support.

Back in March I could see the writing on the wall as the liberals attempted to push one failed liberal fantasy after another. After the so called stimulus bill was passed, I knew the sluggish federal government would prove to be the undoing of all the wild liberal promises. Here was my assessment then:

Higher taxes + higher energy prices + higher food prices + fewer jobs + lower paying jobs + slow economic growth = Obama’s brave new world. Strip away all the rhetorical promises about fighting mythical global  warming, fixing the best medical system in the world, creating equality between rich and poor, punishing the rich and just getting along with everyone on Earth and you find the price tags for these myths. None of which will come true. In the end people will still be struggling, the poor will still be paying for a life time of wrong personal choices, the rich will be rich (and richer with all the government largesse they will be wallowing in). It will be like this for a long time.

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It ain’t coming by August. It ain’t coming by next August if the expectation is that the patient (America) will be close to being healed. Obama promised to help people pay their mortgages and give them money from the rich. An “uptick” is as vague as it dangerous. Will the Dow be back to 2007 levels? Will home values have rebounded to 2007 levels? Will unemployment be back to 2007 levels?

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Wait until after April 15th – that date always brings joy about government. Wait until summer vacations are cancelled and the tourism industry gets hit. Wait until spring ends, summer goes by and people are facing the new school year in economic stress. Wait until Thanksgiving hits and people look back at a year of impotence, and wait until there is a shoe-string Christmas. America never bought into the liberal mantra that Iraq was doomed to fail. They are not going to fall for the liberal mantra on just about everything facing the country. They will KNOW this economic reality.

Here we are at the end of a failed summer. The stimulus program is still stuck in neutral and the liberals are left with trying to cram unwanted policies down the throats of an electorate starting to rise in opposition. Obama’s naive liberal world view left him thinking a bunch of BS promises and some fancy PR events and he could spell bind America into believing all was well.

He failed – and the polls show the truth. First Rasmussen, showing an incredible drop in support and a surging disapproval rating:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 30% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11.

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Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. That’s down a point from yesterday and the lowest level of total approval yet measured for Obama. Fifty-three percent (53%) now disapprove.

That is an incredible feat in such a short time. His ‘strongly disapprove’ rating is getting quite high. And by all accounts that group is including more and more independents. The same trend showed up in Zogby’s poll today:

The latest Zogby Interactive poll of 4,518 likely voters conducted from August 28-31 found 48% disapprove and 42% approve of the job Obama is doing.

It is one thing to lose support among independents and centrists, it is another to push them so far they rise up in opposition, as David Brooks notes:

Two tides swept over American politics last winter. The first was the Obama tide. Barack Obama came into office with an impressive 70 percent approval rating. The second was the independent tide. Over the first months of this year, the number of people who called themselves either Democrats or Republicans declined, while the number who called themselves independents surged ahead.

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From the stimulus to health care, it has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress. The White House has failed to veto measures, like the pork-laden omnibus spending bill, that would have demonstrated independence and fiscal restraint. By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington.

The result is the Obama slide, the most important feature of the current moment. The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.

That’s only the beginning of the slide. As I said back in March, wait until the economy staggers through Thanksgiving and Christmas, with unemployment and underemployment hovering around its current levels (best case scenario) or even worsens.

And what will the voters response be in 2010 when the only target for their two year plus frustration and anxiety is an inept Congress? Do the Democrats really need me to spell this out?

The American people will have only one avenue to express their dissatisfaction. The President’s own party will bear the brunt of their ire. If the liberals thought Hillary Care was a nasty storm, wait until they taste Obamacare on top of a horrid economy. Bill Clinton was able to survive because the dot.com bubble was still growing and the economy was soaring. President Obama and the liberals in Congress have no such cushion against the growing opposition that faces them today.

None. Obama would be better off if he slowed way down and stopped creating a backlash in the middle of the electorate – if he truly wants to blunt the pounding his party will take in over a year from now. But I do not think his team is savvy enough to realize his ship of state has hit the rocks. My guess is it will be full steam ahead.

Tags: 2010 Elections, Poll Numbers, Stimulus Bill, Unemployment