Interesting article at Real Clear Politics about the growing perception that Obama peaked on Election Night and that it has been all downhill all the time since then.
If you look at the Aprroval Rating chart at Rasmussens Reports, you will easily see that is has been almost all downhill, most of the time.
Elections are always invested with a great deal of emotion, but there also needs to be a place for logic and reason as well. Hopefully, we have learned our lesson regarding using too much emotion and too little reason in the process of deciding a national election.
As far as I was concerned, I could not see how a man with no executive, no military and almost no political experience, could possibly be successful in running an organization that is the largest employer in the country and the most powerful military in the world. I hoped that I was wrong back then, but I have to say that nothing much has surprised me since the Inauguration. After a brief head fake toward governing as a moderate, Obama has turned hard left in an attempt to pay off his base and, well, you know the rest.
~~John Cronin~~
By Steven Stark
To listen to some pundits, Barack Obama’s public image began taking a serious beating when the off-year election returns came in a week ago. Or maybe it was the undeserved Nobel Prize, his approach to the war in Afghanistan, or when he revved up his pursuit of national health-care reform.
But the pundits, as usual, are wrong. In reality, Obama peaked the night he was elected.
That astonishing evening was both a blessing and a curse for our 44th president. As the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, Obama made the history books in indelible fashion, generating an uplifting sense of national pride and renewal along the way.
That alone is more than many presidents accomplish in a lifetime.
But that achievement- if that’s what you want to call it – came a very long year ago, before he was even president. The 10 months since he took the oath of office have been a letdown, even to most of his supporters.
Obama still doesn’t seem to grasp that the collective Election Night reverie is over, and that now we are waiting for him to lead us in real time. Sure, a little bit of hubris was probably inevitable, but it led Obama to conclude, despite what he said back then, that the historic election had been about him. When in the end, as always, it was about us.
That night began to reveal an unfortunate truth: having reached a pinnacle on the day he was elected, Obama’s popularity and relationship with the American people had nowhere to go but down. That’s a difficult adjustment to make, and is reminiscent of the apocryphal story about the obsessed fan and her friends who worshipped and followed the Rolling Stones. One night, the fan finally got to spend the evening with Mick Jagger. After she emerged from the hotel the next morning, her friends asked her how it went.
“Well,” she said, “he was alright. But he’s no Mick Jagger.”
Read more at realclearpolitics.com
