Good news on the economic front Wednesday morning: The Gross Domestic Product surged 4 percent in the second quarter of 2014, after dropping 2.1 percent in the first quarter. It’s good economic news that lands on top of continued monthly job growth, meaning that President Obama’s approval rating should move […] Read more »
Obama Rated Poorly on Mideast Conflict
Barack Obama falls short of majority approval for his handling of two of the world’s prime hotspots in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, with an especially weak rating for his work on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. CONT. Ryan Struyk, ABC News Read more »
Thanks, Obama!: Explaining presidential approval
… On its face, presidential approval is a deceptively simple idea. Various polls provide us with near-daily estimates of the percentage of citizens who say they approve of the way the president is handling his job. But when we start to think about the factors that could influence presidential approval, […] Read more »
World of Hurt
The iron fist failed. Then the velvet glove failed. That’s undoubtedly a simplistic verdict on the foreign policy records of the past two presidents, George W. (“iron fist”) Bush and Barack (“velvet glove”) Obama. But it now appears inevitable that the 2016 foreign policy debate will unfold against a widespread […] Read more »
Why Isn’t Obama More Popular?
… As I and many others have written, presidential popularity and national election results are strongly related to the performance of the economy. And the economy has actually been turning out fairly good numbers recently. Jobless claims are down and economic growth is surging. So why hasn’t this benefited Obama […] Read more »
Obama’s 2nd term travails: A lame duck before his time?
The woes of a second term are nothing new, but for President Obama they seem to have started sooner and struck harder than for his predecessors. In his State of the Union address, delivered precisely six months ago Monday, Obama outlined a scaled-down agenda for his sixth year in office, […] Read more »