Feb 27 Losing Ground the Old-Fashioned Way

According to Scott Rasmussen's polling, President Obama's popularity keeps sinking:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -20. For President Obama, the Approval Index has been lower only once.

It isn't likely that President Obama's approval ratings will enjoy a significant upswing anytime soon. His performance yesterday was as usual: condescending, scolding and ill-tempered. Charles Krauthammer said it perfectly during Thursday night's roundtable, saying that with the presidency comes Air Force One and a private chef but it doesn't make you the arbiter of what's legitimate and what's a prop.

I'm kinda curious what people think about the theory I'm working on, namely that Harry Reid's and Speaker Pelosi's incompetence, while not the main cause of his unpopularity, is contributing to his unpopularity.

Yesterday's winners include the GOP campaign committees, Paul Ryan, Lamar Alexander, Tom Coburn, Dave Camp, Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl. Yesterday's losers include, in my opinion, were President Obama, Harry Reid and Max 'We're not that far apart' Baucus.

In my opinion, President Obama took the biggest hit because Paul Ryan, Dave Camp and Eric Cantor all looked more knowledgeable than President Obama on reducing health care and health insurance costs and deficit reduction. Mssrs. Ryan and Camp did a great job of highlighting that the Medicare cuts weren't to strengthen Medicare solvency but that the cuts went to pay for another entitlement.

If I were advising the campaign committees, I'd tell them to turn those exchanges into campaign commercials that run daily the last month of the campaign. The other thing that can't be ignored is that people who watched the summit, whether they watched a little bit or most of it, heard the Republicans' ideas. The people that heard those ideas will start asking why Republicans had been shut out of the process thus far.

More importantly, they'll ask why the Republicans' ideas haven't been incorporated into the legislation. The Democrats don't have a defense for that question. By not including Republican ideas in the legislation, the Democrats will look overly partisan, which will hurt. While the American people will tolerate some partisanship, they won't tolerate that level of partisanship.

The bottom line is that the Democrats' election chances are sinking and they aren't likely to improve. If President Obama doesn't change course, it wouldn't be surprising to see him be a one-term wonder.

Comments welcome at LFR.