Ominous poll results bespeak collapse in the stature of a US president consistently hostile to oil and gas.
The popularity of reelected presidents usually suffers halfway through second terms. But Barack Obama entered office enjoying extraordinary favor, manifest in the Nobel Peace Prize he received before he had done anything except win the election.
Now, in a Quinnipiac University poll, Obama tops the list of "worst presidents" since World War II.
He received that judgment from 33% of survey respondents. That's one percentage point below George W. Bush's searing over the same question in Quinnipiac's poll of July 2006, when the unpopular war in Iraq seemed destined never to end.
Some explanations for Obama's fall are obvious. He's irresolute in foreign affairs. The Supreme Court is rebuking his tests of Executive Branch authority. Health-care reform founders. Scandals—and "trust me" denials—abound. And desperate Central Americans, including unaccompanied children, overwhelm border crossings in the Southwest, many thinking they'd been invited.
Ineptitude will hurt a president's popularity. But something else is diminishing Obama. Because it's a psychological subtlety, observations can be only speculative. Here it is anyway: Obama has never understood that leaders don't whine.
Throughout his presidency, Obama has seemed unable to advance an argument without disparaging, often untruthfully, anyone who might disagree with him.
For too long in his first term he couldn't address problems without blaming them on his predecessor.
In his 2010 State of the Union address, he fussed at Supreme Court justices about a decision he didn't like.
Now he devotes major parts of most speeches to smirking insults of congressional Republicans.
Arguments dependent on calculated polarization usually can't stand on their own logical legs. When habitually made, they suggest weakness.
Presidential whining became exasperating June 27 in Minneapolis when, after blaming Republicans for stresses on the middle class, Obama said: "They don't do anything except block me. And call me names."
He's lucky the week-long Quinnipiac survey was half done by the time he said that.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted on July 3, 2014; author's e-mail: [email protected])
