Lowest Approval Index Ever

Here's some news to put a cloud on Mr. Obama's ten day vacation on Martha's Vineyard:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 19% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -26.

This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama. The previous low was -24 reached yesterday and also in September 2010. Additionally, the level of Strong Approval matches the lowest yet recorded. By way of comparison, President Bush had ratings near the end of his second term in the minus 30s.

The really disturbing part of this survey is that 19% of Americans strongly approve of the job the president is doing. Who are these people? It's understood that a lot of people want to be supportive of the president, but a person can support him while admitting the obvious that he's doing a pretty miserable job. How anyone who has not been living in a cave can strongly approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing is perplexing.

Perhaps many among that 19% are people who don't pay taxes. To those who don't pay income tax high unemployment, deficits, debt, and taxes are matters of little concern. They're unaware of being affected by any of those things. As long as the person is still receiving his check from the government every month the president, in his eyes, is doing a fine job, and if the president is trying hard to prize open the taxpayers' pocketbooks even wider to get even more cash flowing into his pocket, well, then, he's doing a great job.

For many among those who don't pay taxes a great job by the president is one in which he takes more money from those who work and gives it to those who don't.

Is the Debate Over?

Janet Daley of the UK Telegraph adds her thoughts to the cornucopia of opinion that's been written over the last two weeks about the London riots. She argues that the riots have, in the minds of many Brits, decisively settled the debate between proponents of the liberal and conservative worldviews and that liberalism has come out the loser. Here's her lede:

There is no national debate about the epidemic of riots and looting that spread through our cities like a bush fire. Out there in the real world, where people go about the normal business of life, there is no sign of the heated argument that the media is so determined to air. In fact, I cannot remember a time when there has been such crushing unanimity on a matter of public importance: the answers to the questions of why this happened, what went wrong when it began to happen and what needs to follow in its aftermath are considered so blindingly self-evident as to be beyond rational disagreement.

At the margins of this consensus, there are some distant noises. They are the desperate cries of those who fear that they have lost the argument of a lifetime and who want to persuade the great mass of the population that what it saw before its own eyes, hour by hour, night after night on the television news channels was something else altogether.

The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.

What follows is an excellent commentary on both the riots and on liberalism. Check it out.