Obama's Public Approval Slipping

Via The Rhetorican and the Wall Street Journal, "Obama's Approval Numbers, While Still High, Are Slipping":

After a fairly smooth opening, President Barack Obama faces new concerns among the American public about the budget deficit and government intervention in the economy as he works to enact ambitious health and energy legislation, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

These rising doubts threaten to overshadow the president's personal popularity and his agenda, in what may be a new phase of the Obama presidency.

"The public is really moving from evaluating him as a charismatic and charming leader to his specific handling of the challenges facing the country," says Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster who conducts the survey with Republican Bill McInturff. Going forward, he says, Mr. Obama and his allies "are going to have to navigate in pretty choppy waters."

There's good news for the administration, too, including tentative support for Mr. Obama's health-care plan and approval of his nominee for the Supreme Court. The public seems more optimistic about the country's economic future than it did a few weeks earlier, and Americans are still more likely to blame the last administration for the deficit.

But the poll suggests Mr. Obama faces challenges on multiple fronts, including growing concerns about government spending and the bailout of auto companies. A majority of people also disapprove of his decision to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

More at the link.

Obama's support has dropped sharply among political independents - whichh is interesting, since if these "independents" are roughly the same as Gallup's "moderates," then the declining support of this cohort could be trouble, and soon:

There is an important distinction in the respective ideological compositions of the Republican and Democratic Parties. While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page -- 73% call themselves conservative -- Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal.

True to their nonpartisan tendencies, close to half of political independents -- 45% -- describe their political views as "moderate." Among the rest, the balance of views is tilted more heavily to the right than to the left: 34% are conservative, while 20% are liberal.

Gallup trends show a slight increase since 2008 in the percentages of all three party groups calling themselves "conservative," which accounts for the three percentage-point increase among the public at large.

Check also Cold Fury, which has some comments on President Obama's interview with Gerald Seib:

The lying dickwad has been a hard-Left socialist his whole goddamned life, which has been clear from his every spoken word; his every written word; his choice of associations; his choice of “community organizing” and public-sector careers (never once having held an actual job in his useless life); the few votes he actually bothered with in his brief Senate career — and he now wants us to know it’s all because of George Fucking Dubya Bush.

What a worthless, manipulative, buck-passing prick.

Hmm, I wonder if we can place Cold Fury in the "conservative" column?

Added: Memeorandum has a thread. Plus, the New York Times concurs with WSJ, "Poll Finds Unease With Obama on Key Issues."