Thread: Relentless Incompetence: Americans Are Giving Up on Obama

Relentless Incompetence: Americans Are Giving Up on Obama


By Edward Morrissey June 5, 2014 6:00 AM

Over the last several months, the American public has had a hard and clear look at the executive talent inside the White House, and has begun to despair for real leadership and competence.
When leadership fails, people stop following. It appears in the sixth year of the Barack Obama presidency, that moment has arrived.
CNN’s most recent poll provided a clear indicator of this dynamic in the wake of two major controversies involving military issues. The results showed that Obama did not gain a majority of support for any of twelve issues surveyed from the respondents. In fact, in ten of the twelve issues, majorities disapproved of the President’s performance, and only on one – the environment, usually an overwhelming Democratic strength – did his approval exceed his disapproval, and only barely at 49/45. On the economy and health care, which the poll identified as the top two priorities of its respondents, Obama’s approval ratings sank to 38/61 and 36/63, respectively.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza assigns the change in polling to a crisis of leadership and competence in the White House. “The core of Obama’s appeal,” wrote Cillizza about the 2008 election “was the idea that he would restore competence back to the White House after President George W. Bush's eight years…. Obama openly embraced the idea that he was the anti-Bush on nothing much more than his commitment to putting the best people in the right places within his administration.”
Related: Obama’s Unpopularity Continues to Hurt Dems’ Prospects
Now, the series of disastrous scandals and unmistakable incompetence have completely eroded confidence in his leadership, Cillizza argues, pointing to a Pew poll series in which his perceived executive competence went from 70/15 in February 2009 to 43/51 in December 2013.
1) Obamacare. That final result came after the inexplicable failure of the White House to take much of an interest in the rollout of its central domestic-policy project – Obamacare. By December, the Healthcare.gov exchange that the Department of Health and Human Services had 42 months and upward of $400 million to build turned out to be a complete flop.
Millions of people who had been promised they could keep existing plans found their insurance canceled, and millions more who managed to enroll in a plan found that they couldn’t keep their doctor, as Obama had promised. In the face of these disasters, Obama scowled at the cameras, proclaimed himself madder than anyone, and … left the people in place who’d failed.
Related: Double Digit Health Premiums Coming
When the sheer weight of the mandate and its penalties convinced eight million Americans to finally sign-up through the still-buggy website by the twice-extended deadline, Obama claimed victory. Just this week, though, we discovered that two million Medicaid enrollees or more may not have been processed correctly in that still-faulty system, and may not have coverage after all.
Who could have guessed that leaving the same incompetents to run the system they couldn’t produce correctly in the first place would create more problems? Pretty much anyone with any actual executive or managerial experience, actually.
2) Department of Veterans Affairs. The lack of responsiveness at the VA was such an issue that Obama campaigned on it in 2008. He demanded a huge increase in funding from Congress, and the VA annual budget went up 78 percent during his presidency, with $235 billion more in funding during the last five-plus years over the FY2008 baseline.
However, the last time Obama sat down with VA Secretary Eric Shinseki prior to this spring had been in July 2012. It took whistleblowers telling the media that wait lists had been falsified at VA facilities and that dozens of veterans in Phoenix had died while being denied medical attention to shake the tree.
A subsequent internal audit showed that 64 percent of all VA facilities had instances of wait-list fraud, and that 13 percent of all schedulers had received training in how to commit it. Obama scowled at the cameras twice in this scandal, pronounced himself once again madder than anyone, and only finally accepted the resignation from Shinseki just before the second presser.
Related: Pogo Blows the Lid Off Veterans Affairs Scandal
3) National Security. This week, we have another serious crisis, this time in national security, and the incompetence reached new heights. President Obama traded five high-ranking Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay for a soldier held captive for almost five years in Afghanistan. Two of the men released are wanted by the United Nations for war crimes, and one was a close associate of Osama bin Laden himself. Obama insisted he had confidence that the men posed no risk to American security while celebrating the return of an American service member.
Then the story began to fall apart. First, the White House mischaracterized the capture of Bowe Bergdahl as “on the battlefield” after serving “with honor and distinction.” The Pentagon had concluded in 2010 that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had in fact deserted his post, leaving behind a note to that effect and that at the least Bergdahl had wandered into Taliban territory on purpose.
Soldiers who served with Bowe Bergdahl erupted in outrage, accusing him of desertion and the Pentagon of actively suppressing the truth. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf responded to these first-person reports by soldiers who had served at the post Bergdahl abandoned by suggesting that they weren’t credible witnesses, while other White House insiders told NBC’s Chuck Todd that these soldiers were conducting a “swift boat” smear.”
Nor was that the only White House offense. A law passed with Obama’s signature requires 30-day notice before transferring any detainee out of Guantanamo Bay, let alone the highest-risk Taliban officials Obama released. The White House claimed there was no time to notify Congress before getting the deal done.
Related: More Mismanagement and Millions Wasted at VA
Yet the White House managed to put Bowe Bergdahl’s parents next to Obama for the Saturday announcement. They also insisted that the administration had ongoing consultations on the question of trading the five Taliban for Bergdahl. But the two chairs of the intelligence committees – Rep. Mike Rodgers, a Republican, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat – both said the last such consultation took place in 2011, and the overwhelming and bipartisan consensus opposed such a deal.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) later told Fox News that the file on Bergdahl given to the Senate Intelligence Committee when deliberating on this question never included Bergdahl’s note nor the testimony of other soldiers about the nature of his disappearance.
Obama asked Americans to accept his own assurances that the five released detainees would pose no threat to the United States. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel joined him in making those assurances and said that the cases had been reviewed thoroughly. The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake and Time Magazine separately reported, however, that the review had been rushed through to get the conclusion desired by the White House. Lake’s sources in the defense and intelligence communities called this “forcing the consensus,” while Time Magazine’s source made it even clearer. “There never was the conversation,” the official reported. “This was out of the norm.”
Related: The Bergdahl Affair Feeds Right Into 2016
While Hagel backed Obama’s story, others at the Pentagon strongly disagreed. Fox reporter Jim Angle reported that one source in the military said, “Many at the Pentagon advised the President not to make the trade.” Senior officials at the Department of Defense had warned the White House that releasing these five detainees would be “like handing over five 4-star generals of the Taliban.” Releasing them now, rather than at the end of US participation in Afghanistan that Obama plans for 2016, puts more than 32,000 Americans in Afghanistan at risk of these high-ranking Taliban commanders’ re-entry into the war.
Nothing about Obama’s performance in these scandals and debacles should give anyone confidence in his assurances -- not of security, not of competence, not even of being madder than anyone. The polling numbers suggest that Americans have finally reached a point where the incompetence and dishonesty are just too obvious to ignore any longer.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/relent...100000019.html

NBC/WSJ Poll: Obama's Foreign Policy Rating Plummets, Even Without Iraq

By Mark Murray

The percentage of Americans approving of President Barack Obama’s handling of foreign policy issues has dropped to the lowest level of his presidency as he faces multiple overseas challenges, including in Iraq, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Additionally, the public is evenly split on whether Obama is a competent manager of the federal bureaucracy. And a majority of respondents – 54 percent – believe the term-limited president is no longer able to lead the country.

Dick Cheney: ‘Rarely Has U.S. President Been So Wrong’

“This is a bad poll for President Obama, and not a good poll for anybody else,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democrats Peter Hart and Fred Yang.
“Whether it’s [Vladimir] Putin, Ukraine, the VA hospitals, Bowe Bergdahl, the events have controlled Obama, rather than Obama having controlled the events,” Hart adds. “He may be winning the issues debate, but he’s losing the political debate, because they don’t see him as a leader.”
More oppose Bergdahl prisoner swap than support it
The poll was crafted before the instability in Iraq grabbed headlines, so it doesn’t contain questions on that subject. It also was conducted before the United States arrested a suspect in the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Read the full poll here

But it shows an American public that has grown dissatisfied with President Obama on foreign policy and national security decisions.
Just 37 percent approve of his handling of foreign policy, which is an all-time low in the survey, while 57 percent disapprove, an all-time high.
What’s more, by a 44 percent-to-30 percent margin, Americans disagree with the Obama administration’s decision to secure the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five imprisoned Taliban fighters.

We know more about the challenges facing President Obama in the next two years of his term than how this year’s congressional elections will play out in the next six months

And respondents are evenly divided if the details of Bergdahl’s disappearance from his base in Afghanistan matter in the U.S. decision to secure his release: 47 percent say the details matter, while 46 percent say they don’t.
President Obama’s overall approval rating in the poll is at 41 percent, down three points from April. That’s tied for his all-time low in the survey.
And his favorable-unfavorable rating is upside down (41 percent-45 percent) after being right-side up two months ago (44 percent-41 percent).
Perhaps most troubling for the president, 54 percent think he is unable to lead the country and get the job done, compared with 42 percent who believe he can.
The midterm matchup
These numbers put the Democratic Party at a clear disadvantage heading into November’s midterm elections, when a president’s job rating can often be predictive of the general outcome.
But, the pollsters say, Republicans also have perception problems that could limit their potential gains.
“We know more about the challenges facing President Obama in the next two years of his term than how this year’s congressional elections will play out in the next six months,” said Fred Yang, the Democratic pollster.
According to the survey, 45 percent of registered voters prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, versus 43 percent who want a GOP-held one.
Thirty-four percent say their vote will be a signal of opposition to Obama, and 24 percent say it will be a signal of support; 41 percent say it won’t signal anything about the president.
Yet while Obama is unpopular in the poll, he looks like the homecoming king compared with the Republican Party.
Just 29 percent of respondents have a favorable view of the GOP, versus 45 percent who have an unfavorable view. (By comparison, the Democratic Party’s fav/unfav rating is 38 percent positive, 40 percent negative.)

Exclusive: Obama Defends Taliban Prisoner Swap

Views of the Tea Party are even worse, with 22 percent seeing it in a favorable light and 41 percent in a negative one.
And one week after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his congressional primary to a Tea Party challenger, the NBC/WSJ poll finds a divided Republican Party.
A majority of Republicans who are Tea Party supporters (56 percent) say the Tea Party has too little influence inside the party, while a plurality of Republicans who aren’t supporters (41 percent) say it has too much influence.
Dissatisfaction with everyone in Washington
Indeed, if there is one pervasive theme from the poll, it’s dissatisfaction – with everyone in Washington.
Only 32 percent of voters say their member of Congress deserves to be re-elected, compared with 57 percent who want to give a new person a chance.
And just 25 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction.
This is the ninth-straight NBC/WSJ poll over the past year when 30 percent of the nation or less has had a positive attitude about the nation’s direction.

Other findings

• After the Obama administration announced new Environmental Protection Agency regulations, 57 percent say they approve of a proposal that would require companies to reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming, even if it leads to higher energy costs for consumers.
• A combined 61 percent believe that global climate change requires either “immediate action” to combat it or “some action.” By contrast, 37 percent say that the country doesn’t know enough about global climate change, or that concern about it is unwarranted.
• Six-in-10 say the problems associated with Veterans Affairs hospitals are due to longstanding bureaucratic issues; just 14 percent say they’re due to poor management by the Obama administration.
• Fifty-nine percent oppose closing the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects – up seven points since 2009.
• And only 27 percent say the Afghanistan war was worth it – down 13 points from a year ago.

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted June 11-15 of 1,000 adults (including 337 reached by cell phone), and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

First published June 17th 2014, 3:31 pm

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/firs...ithout-n133461

Polls: Obama Approval Drops to Fresh Low, Major Midterm Impact

Guy Benson | Jun 18, 2014
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President Obama's polling slump continues apace:

Phil Kerpen ✔ @kerpen Follow
Obama hits fresh lows in today's Reuters/Ipsos. Approve/Disapprove: 35.7/59.2 (15.8/42.1 Strongly) http://polling.reuters.com/#!response/CP3/type/day/dates/20130101-20140617 …

2:21 PM - 17 Jun 2014
Reuters Polling - View results for "Obama approval" from 2013-01-01...

View results for "Obama approval" from 2013-01-01 to 2014-06-17

Reuters Top News @Reuters


In the fresh NBC/WSJ poll (see updates below on Hillary), Obama's approval slides to (41/53) -- which is tied for his lowest approval level ever in that series. He's at (41/54) on the economy, and a dreadful (37/57) on foreign affairs. A 54-percent majority say Obama is "no longer able to lead the country." For the umpteenth time, the president may have already attained effective lame duck status, but that doesn't make his polling irrelevant. Far from it. I've routinely pointed to political data analyst Sean Trende's formula that suggests a strong historical correlation between flagging presidential approval ratings and substantial Congressional gains for the opposition party:

[It] isn’t a perfect relationship, but presidential job approval is still the most important variable for how his party fares in midterm elections, explaining about half of the variance. The relationship is highly statistically significant: For every point in job approval the president loses, his party loses 0.6 percent of its caucus. (The chart doesn’t measure drop in job approval; just job approval.) So, at 60 percent, the president should lose 5 percent of his caucus; at 50 percent, it is around 12 percent of his caucus lost; at 40 percent, it’s about 18 percent of his caucus lost -- which would be 36 seats. Now the latter is highly unlikely to happen...As I’ve said before, this election isn’t going to be about sixth-year itches or any such electoral mumbo-jumbo. It’s going to be about presidential job approval, supplemented by the state of the economy (which also affects job approval to a degree) and how overexposed or underexposed the president’s party is. Right now, the second factor provides a drag beyond the president’s job approval, while the third factor will work heavily to Democrats’ advantage on Election Day...It is still far too early to speculate about how many seats Democrats will lose (or perhaps gain) in the 2014 elections. But if Obama’s job approval is 40 percent on Election Day, gains would be unlikely, and Democratic losses in the low double digits...would be plausible.

Republicans need to net six seats to reclaim the US Senate in November. The Pew Research Center is out with a new analysis that posits that a "dug in" electorate doesn't augur well for Democrats in 2014:

Since the Affordable Care Act was passed nearly four years ago, a plurality of Americans have disapproved of it. Since the onset of the Great Recession six years ago, more than 80% of Americans have rated economic conditions as only fair or poor. And since winning a second term, Barack Obama’s approval score has mostly been in the mid-40s or lower. One or more of these attitudes will have to move in a clearly positive direction for the Democratic Party to avoid a drubbing in the congressional elections, according to a new analysis of voter opinion. So far the indications for that are not so good. Recent months have shown signs of economic progress and indications that the Affordable Care Act has begun to achieve its goals. But there is little indication that the unemployment rate’s falling to 6.3%, the Dow Jones average soaring to a new high and the ACA signing up 8 million people, (including many young people,) had any effect on attitudes about these two key issues.

Perhaps the signs of "progress" cited haven't impacted attitudes because people either intuitively or explicitly understand what's really going on. For instance, the unemployment rate has dropped steadily because the US workforce participation rate continues to hover around a three-decade-plus low. People are leaving the workforce, and the official U-3 jobs number is "benefiting" from that effect. Most Americans simply don't believe the economy is improving. And on Obamacare, people know that its core promises have been broken, and that the White House's much-touted "milestones" aren't all they're cracked up to be. Not even close: A large majority of "new" exchange enrollees previously had insurance, a sizable chunk of them aren't actually enrolled, and millions of applications have been marred with complex data discrepancies. And, contra an assertion in the paragraph above, not that "many" young people have signed up for Obamacare, when compared to the administration's targets. Pew's write-up continues: "A special analysis of a recent Pew Research Center/USA Today survey suggests that these three factors are strong correlates of congressional preferences in 2014. Taken together, opinions about the national economy, the Affordable Care Act, and the president’s job performance accurately predict congressional voting intentions." Take a look at this chart, which isn't likely to reassure nervous Democrats:





But before conservatives get cocky, behold this headline: "Clinton Does Better Than Obama on Every Issue, Poll Says." On that note, I'll leave you with Allahpundit doing his Eeyore thing:

Allahpundit @allahpundit Follow Insurmountable gender gap #HillaryInThreeWords
5:43 PM - 17 Jun 2014


UPDATE - She may be a front-runner, but she's not politically bulletproof. Lots of room for the 2014 numbers to recede closer to 2008 levels, too:

Mark Murray ✔ @mmurraypolitics Follow New NBC/WSJ poll: Public divided on Hillary for 2016: 38% would definitely/probably vote for her; 37% say no chance
6:30 PM - 17 Jun 2014






http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybens...campaign=nl_pm

http://www.alipac.us/f19/breaking-ne...2/#post1418675

In No Mood for Trophies

By Charlie Cook

With the midterm elections less than six months away, it's a good time to take stock of things and even venture a few assumptions. But first, we need to acknowledge that when we talk about public attitudes, we are talking about human behavior and unexpected national events, which can cause close races to tip one way or the other, or to make less competitive contests even more so.

Having said that, it appears that the political environment, national economy, and issue agenda are unlikely to change significantly before November. At this point, this election is what it is, and it will be fought on terrain pretty much like what we see today.


(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)Because midterm elections are more a referendum on the White House occupant than anything else, President Obama's 44 percent approval/51 percent disapproval ratings in the Gallup Poll for both April and May are deeply troubling for Democrats. Obama's Gallup approval numbers have risen 3 points since last fall, when they hit 41 percent with the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov. That improvement now seems to have leveled off, however, and his ratings are still in a bad place. They are comparable to his numbers just before the 2010 election, when Democrats lost 63 House and six Senate seats.
You could say that if Obama were a stock, he would have a very narrow trading range: His approval numbers are rarely better than 45 or 46 percent; equally rarely are these numbers worse than 41 or 40 percent. His disapproval numbers, meanwhile, are in the 50s. With Gallup's pollsters conducting more than 15,000 interviews each month, and with the firm using consistent methodology, it's a good poll to watch for trend data.
Six of the critical Democratic-held Senate seats up this year are in states that Mitt Romney carried by 14 points or more in 2012. It's safe to assume that Obama's job-approval ratings in these places are substantially lower than his national numbers.
If a midterm election is a referendum on anything other than the president, it is on the economy or, more accurately, the public's perception of the economy. The economy is expected to bounce back this quarter from its painful, weather-induced hiccup in the first quarter, when gross domestic product contracted by 1 percent.
The just-released Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey of 54 top economists forecasts that the economy will grow at a 3.7 percent rate for the second quarter, then settle in at 3.1 percent in the third and fourth quarters. Unemployment, which was 6.7 percent in the first quarter, is expected to gradually decline to 6.4 percent in the second, 6.3 percent in the third, and 6.1 percent in the fourth.

You could say that if Obama were a stock, he would have a very narrow trading range.

Although the unemployment arrow is technically moving in the right direction, any jobless rate of 6 percent or higher isn't good. Indeed, recent polling showed that a strong majority of Americans believe we remain in a recession, even though the recession that began in December 2007 was declared officially over in June 2009. While various consumer-confidence ratings are showing numbers that are among the best since the onset of the recession in 2007, the readings are still at very low levels, and Americans are still highly anxious about the current state and future of the economy. This "three-steps-forward, two-steps-back" recovery means that few voters are in the mood to hand Obama or the Democrats trophies or ribbons for it.
In terms of the issue agenda, attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act have not significantly changed and are unlikely to between now and November. Obamacare overshadows any other specific issue; no improvement on the public's attitudes toward it is another tough blow to the party.
Still another problem that seems to be growing for Democrats is the general perception—whether someone agrees or disagrees with this administration on policy—that Obama officials lack competence. That on simple matters of execution—be it handling the economy, the launch of HealthCare.gov, the general administration of the ACA, or problems with the Veterans Administration—they seem like the gang that can't shoot straight. The steady erosion of confidence in the Obama administration further limits Democrats' ability to bounce back from negative events.
There was a point when voters hit the mute button and stopped listening to George H.W. Bush and then to his son George W. Bush. We now seem to have reached that point with Obama. Voters have thrown up their hands and lost hope that things will get any better.

This article appears in the June 21, 2014 edition of National Journal Magazine as In No Mood for Trophies.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/the-c...phies-20140618

bttt

http://www.alipac.us/f9/thanks-obama...merica-312967/