President Obama may be traveling down the same second term path as his predecessor.
A new Quinnipiac poll reveals that the president’s reputation has reached its lowest point ever with 39% of voters approving of Obama’s performance and 54% disapproving. This is just 2 percentage points higher than President Bush’s 2005 approval rating.
The Quinnipiac poll is just the latest of several polls showing President Obama’s decline. According to a new Gallup poll, less than half of Americans, 47%, say Obama is a “strong and decisive leader” which is down six percentage points since September. The poll also reveals that Americans’ view of President Obama as “honest and trustworthy” has dipped 5 points with 50% saying yes and 47% saying no. A recent Pew Research Survey found the president’s approval rating falling to 41%, with record low marks on the economy and health care, and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll revealed his overall approval is at a record low 42%.
The good news for President Obama is he is doing better than Congress – keeping par for the course low – who have sunk to their lowest approval rating of 9%. With almost half of Americans wanting to replace everyone in Congress, and less than 20 days left on the Congressional calendar, Congress has a lot of work to do to help boost their approval – and they’ve got a lot of ground to make up on that they lost during the government shutdown.
“The government shutdown in October clearly didn’t help Congress’ image, and it appears that the impact of that incident may linger,” Gallup reported. But if you ask Senator Ted Cruz, as Jay Leno did late last week, that mess wasn’t really the Republicans’ – or his, for that matter. I’m one of the many people who was not a fan of shutting down the government,” Sen. Cruz said on The Tonight Show.” The reason we had a government shutdown is President Obama and the Democrats said ‘we will not negotiate and will not compromise.’”