Obama is currently enjoying not only a vacation with his family in Hawai'i, but also a "second honeymoon" with the public at large. If history is any guide, the fiscal cliff deal could create another wave of approval on top of the "second honeymoon."
As we're now in the final stretch of political Armageddon -- judging from the intensity and hype of most folks finally paying attention -- there's that ongoing discussion about the "undecideds."
So much of the rhetoric these days is about us taking responsibility for how we react and feel. But what if our negative reactions are normal and warranted?
The idea that there is no grand plan, no tried-and-true blueprint that can show us how to find our place in the world, is one scary thought. What the First Lady reminds us is that, as women, we're all in this together. And hooray for that.
This month Obama poll watchers got some good news, and some bad news. This was capped off by the Washington punditocracy making a stupid comparison between polling for Obama and Carter.
[Program Note: Last month, we ran this column four days before the end of May, due to travel plans. We promised we'd update the preliminary numbers i...
Commitment phobia. Analysis paralysis. Grass-is-greener syndrome. You name it, women today are plagued by it. Unlike our mothers, these women were bor...
"What a difference a death makes." President Obama announced at the very beginning of the month that Osama bin Laden was dead, and his poll numbers reacted almost immediately.
April was a pretty miserable month for Barack Obama, mostly due to the high price of gasoline at the pump. But May is already shaping up to be one of Obama's best months ever, for one very obvious reason.
While catastrophic world events dominated the news for most of the month, Obama's approval rating was being hit with a creeping domestic problem -- the rising price of gasoline.
When taken month-to-month, January, 2011, was Obama's best month of his entire presidency. Not only did he finally get his bump -- but it was a truly significant bump.
Obama once again charted an unbelievably stable month in terms of approval ratings. The mildly good news was in his disapproval rating, which dropped significantly over the course of December.
Last month I rashly wrote that since Obama was starting the month on an upswing, he had a good chance of posting largish gains in September. This didn't happen.
July had some political successes for Obama, but the public once again didn't give him any credit for passing Wall Street reform, or any of the other achievements Obama chalked up.
Obama seems to have hit a plateau in his approval ratings, which have remained largely unchanged for the past three months. Could it be that we've all just made up our minds about the job the president is doing?
Will Obama's presidency wind up charting a similar course as Carter, or will he recover as Reagan did? Only a fool would even contemplate making such a prediction at this point, that's all that really can be said.
Everyone was looking for a healthy bounce in Obama's poll numbers after health reform passed. This bounce has either failed to materialize yet, or is so gradual it likely won't end up being called a "bounce."
After taking a look at Obama's numbers for the month, we continue our march backwards through history, this month serving up a comparison between Obama and Richard Nixon's term-and-a-half.
This month, the news for Obama fans is not bad. It's not get-up-and-cheer good, either, but it's a lot better than the news has been for the past two months.