Ed Morrisey:
How to explain Barack Obama’s dramatically declining approval numbers? Well, there’s the fact that five years of Obamanomics has brought America to its lowest civilian workforce participation rate from about the decade average at the beginning of the June 2009 recovery to a 36-year low. The passage of ObamaCare turned out to be the most competent part of the whole thing, and the rollout has been an utter disaster. On top of that, our foreign policy is at its lowest ebb since Jimmy Carter, and it’s clear now that the Obama administration didn’t bother to prepare for threats in places where even a child could see them. Plus, there’s that whole Lie of the Year — “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
The President has another theory. Apparently he thinks that people suddenly discovered his ethnicity:
Obama’s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.
Er … riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. In order to buy this nonsense, one would have to believe that millions of people approved of him despite his ethnicity for several years before deciding over the last few months to discover their inner Bull Connor. And that just coincided with Obama’s biggest blunders and the exposure of his dishonesty in selling ObamaCare to the public.
