The Divider In Chief

In the last ten days, this writer was "push polled" over the phone by a political survey company who was hired to evaluate the current President's performance.  (Note: the polling company refused to give their name, or state who hired them to do the poll.) 

In taking the poll, I was asked to rate Obama's performance as President across a number of areas using different measuring criteria.

It didn't take long, perhaps the second question into the "poll" when I realized something was terribly amiss.  Of the seven possible answers one could give to any question in the "poll" five of them would be considered "favorable" by any reasonably intelligent human being.  One answer "fair" seemed neutral, the final answer "poor" seemed obviously negative.

Being the staunch Conservative (No, I'm not a Republican) that I am, all of my answers to the best of my objective capability determined that Obama was of course doing a rather "poor" job in office. 

By about the fifth question, I decided to try to see if I could get the pollster to simply hang up as I added a significant amount of color commentary around my "poor" rating of Obama.  Amongst other comments, I strongly suggested that Jimmy Carter was perhaps the happiest guy on the planet because finally someone had come along that would be a far worse President than he was.

By the last question (there were 20 in all) I could tell the pollster had enough of my commentary with each answer and the poll ended.  But I wondered just why of the seven possible responses, five would be considered favorable, one neutral, and one "poor" by any reasonable test.

Then a friend forwarded this article to me just this past weekend which explained it all.  It seems pollster John Zogby is onto the game that the other so-called "neutral" polling organizations are playing.  Some of these polls show Obama with a 65% approval rating, but that simply cannot be true with the number of Democrats that oppose him (estimated 17%) while only 15% of Republicans polled have a favorable opinion. So where did the 65% number come from?

The answer: giving the President a "fair" rating is now being counted as "favorable" thus inflating the poll numbers. 

With polling methodologies like this, it's got to be awfully hard for Obama to poll negatively doesn't it?  So much for objectivity in polling, let's just TELL the American people what to think via push-polls, right?

Pew Research also got it right today in pointing out that Obama is in fact more divisive than President Bush was at the same point in his Presidency.  As Pew points out, there is a 61 point gap in how Democrats and Republicans view Obama's performance.  This makes Obama the most divisive President in the last 40+ years, at least at this point in his Administration. 

Here the bad news for Obama is that so-called "Independent" voters have begun to abandon him.  His approval rating with them has fallen to 55% according to Pew Research, which represents a second consecutive point drop in this key category.  According to Pew Research, National Defense is a key issue for Independent voters, and Obama's poor performance here is leaving them feeling the United State is less secure.  North Korea's missile launch over the weekend has had an impact, as nearly 60% of Independent voters believe the time for talking with North Korea is over, and the time for a Military response has come. 

Liberals and the lamestream media can try and prop Obama up all they want, the reality that he may be the most disastrous President in US History is rapidly setting in not just with Republicans, but with Independent voters as well. Thats' a recipe for disaster for Democrats in 2010, and for Obama's "historic" Presidency.

Somewhere, Jimmah Carter must be smiling.