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Obama And His Approval Ratings on the Issues

11/12/2009, by Proloy Bhatta

HIGHLIGHTS

Approval rating, Relationships with other countries: 58%.
Approval rating, Gas prices: 40%, drop of 9%.
Immigration may be coming to the forefront of political discussions.

AP-Gfk released a pretty comprehensive poll yesterday and I will summarize the results here.

The poll was conducted Nov 5-9, 2009.

Obama's Approval on the Issues

Issue	Approve	Disapprove
Relationships with other countries	58	32
Environment	54	30
Energy	52	32
Terrorism	50	39
Health care	49	46
Economy	46	49
Situation in Iraq	46	45
Unemployment	44	47
Taxes	42	46
Situation in Afghanistan	42	48
Gas prices	40	39
Federal budget deficit	40	51
Immigration	39	41

Gas Prices

In October, Obama's approval rating on gas prices was 49% but now it has dropped to 40% -- his biggest drop with respect to any issue.

This seemed very odd because I did not notice any increase in gas prices during that span. According to the website LosAngelesGasPrices.com, the average price for gasoline today in Los Angeles is $2.975 while it was $3.006 exactly a month ago.

But when I checked the United States average, it has gone up from about $2.46 to $2.65 during that stretch. Nationally, gas prices were above $2.60 in June and August but were below $2.50 in July and October. Although I expect gas prices to continue to increase in parallel with the price of gold, Obama is unfairly getting a bad rap on his handling of gas prices.

Immigration

As usual, Obama's handling of "immigration" is always poor. I stated in an earlier post that I felt immigrants would likely be scapegoated by the opposition party during the recession but it has yet to happen.

But in a recent post by Kevin Sack of the New York Times, illegal immigration has now come to the forefront as a key issue. According to him, the health care bill that was passed by the House on Saturday "sets up a looming confrontation with the Senate over the extent to which illegal immigrants should have access to public resources".

He goes on to explain how taxpayer dollars would be used to facilitate the purchase of insurance for illegal immigrants.

Under pressure from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose votes were needed for passage, House leaders decided to allow illegal immigrants to shop for insurance on the exchange. The immigrants would have to pay the full cost of their policies. But the exchange, which would be created and operated with taxpayer dollars, might provide them with lower prices than available on the open market. And one option would be a new government insurance plan.

Unemployment

In April, Obama's approval rating in handling unemployment was 59%. but boy has he come a long way down since that point. Unemployment reached above double digits this month and is expected to increase before it gets better. Vince Farrell over at CNBC says that "unemployment is a lagging indicator and markets turn up long before unemployment peaks". If that is the case, we may already be out of the recession.

Peter Schiff, Senate 2010 candidate in CT and president of Euro Pacific Capital, does not buy it.

He says that Obama's policies and the bailouts are having the opposite effect on employment. In an article entitled "Obama Stimulus Will Destroy Jobs" by BusinessInsider.com, Schiff said

"We need the private sector creating jobs without government interference. We need productive jobs. We don’t want to work just to work. We need to work so we can have real productivity. What we need in this country, in addition to less government, is more savings and more production. But what Obama’s trying to do is force feed more spending and more borrowing into an economy that is suffering from an excess of both."

That's an old article but his rhetoric has yet to change.