The LA Times today has a story about Obama’s fall in the polls, but why is this the headline ?
Obama is fast losing white voters’ support
Since whites constitute, depending on your opinion of whether Latinos are white (I think so), the vast majority of the population, any significant drop in Obama’s poll numbers would be a drop in white voters’ support. Blacks, who constitute 13% of the population, are unlikely to change their support. Whites, including Hispanics, are 80% of the population and so will always be the group most represented in polls. Why the headline ?
Among white Democrats, Obama’s job approval rating has dropped 11 points since his 100-days mark in April, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It has dropped by 9 points among white independents and whites over 50, and by 12 points among white women — all groups that will be targeted by both parties in next year’s midterm elections.
“While Obama has a lock on African Americans, his support among white voters seems to be almost in a free fall,” said veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse.
OK, that’s fair.
But the drop in support among whites also comes as some conservatives have stoked controversies that have the potential to further erode Obama’s standing among centrists — including some controversies that resulted from White House stumbles.
One such episode came to a head Sunday when Van Jones, Obama’s green jobs czar, resigned after a week of criticism over past inflammatory statements and for signing onto conspiracy theories questioning whether the U.S. government played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. A White House official acknowledged Sunday that Jones had been vetted less rigorously than other officials.
Still fair.
In another episode, some conservatives have criticized a White House dinner invitation issued to the lead lawyer in the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuits that have forced the government to disclose Bush-era interrogation techniques. The lawyer was invited to an event for the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.
That’s a weird story and I have never heard of this. If I haven’t heard of it, I doubt many others have either.
These controversies have followed conspiracy theories that the president was born overseas and is ineligible to hold office, and that his true religion is Islam — false rumors that some Democrats worry could be affecting the public’s view of the president and his party.
That’s a fringe story and, I suspect, included to discredit the right for concerns, legitimate concerns, about Obama’s agenda. So far, I have seen no major issue described in the story and there have been plenty.
Pew first identified a slippage in white support immediately after a news conference in July, when Obama surprised many by saying that a white police officer had acted “stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard professor.
Now, we see one of the serious concerns arise. A president on national TV attacks a police officer without knowing any facts except the race of the two parties.
One black congressman, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), was quoted last week alleging that opposition to Obama’s healthcare policies was “a bias, a prejudice, an emotional feeling.”
“Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Rangel said, according to the New York Post.
Actually, I haven’t gotten over the fact that Rangel, like many senior members of the administration, doesn’t pay his taxes and gets away with it. Now, we get back to the heart of the story:
Democratic pollster David Beattie conducted a survey last month in one competitive congressional district that found that more than a quarter of independents believed Obama had not proven his natural-born status. The same sentiment was expressed by nearly 6 in 10 Republican women — a group that Beattie said would be important for a Democratic victory.
He declined to name the district because the polling was private, but said that such questions about Obama’s background seemed to be a “proxy” for voters’ growing unease with Obama’s ambitious agenda, which has included a potential push to create a government-sponsored health insurance plan.
This is utter BS but evidence of the plan to discredit criticism by linking it to fringe conspiracy theories.
More than half of whites older than 50 approved of Obama’s job performance in April. But now, after weeks of Republican accusations that the Democrats would seek to cut Medicare benefits, that number is 43%. Among white Democrats, Obama’s approval rating dropped to 78%, from 89%.
Some Democrats are hopeful that Republican opposition to Obama may be firing up core conservatives but failing to win over even skeptical centrists and independents to the GOP cause.
I don’t think it took Republicans to make the point that Obama plans Medicare cuts after he has talked about his grandmother’s hip replacement, which he thought a waste, and giving pain pills to an elderly woman instead of a pacemaker. The Democrats in the Senate committee considering the health reform legislation are talking about $500 billion in cuts. It doesn’t take Republicans to say this:
Baucus has declined to release details. But people involved in the talks said the plan would make more than $500 billion worth of changes to Medicare over the next decade, charging wealthy seniors more for prescription drug coverage, cutting $120 billion in payments to private insurance companies that serve some seniors and trimming projected payments to hospitals by $155 billion in an effort to spur efficiencies.
The Times seems to be turning over the race card as a strategy in case Obama doesn’t pull the rabbit out of the hat this week with his speech. I don’t think he will and I think they will turn more and more to these stories to discredit the criticism.
Tags: health care, Obama, politics, Republicans
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