Eleanor Clift has put her finger on precisely the reason Obama’s polls are slipping: He isn’t blaming George W. Bush enough.
Obama hasn’t done as good a job as Reagan of blaming his predecessor. Jimmy Carter for years served as the GOP’s version of Herbert Hoover while Obama let George W. Bush slip away into the ether, a former president so invisible that he might as well be in a witness-protection program.
Boy, with keen insights like this, it’s hard to believe Newsweek is up for sale, huh?
UPDATE: She also writes:
“It could turn either way,” says Matt Bennett, cofounder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “We’re not by any means locked into a political reality at this point.” Looking for the bright side, Bennett says the party in power never wants the president polling below 50, and Obama against all odds has maintained that base line.
Er, no. That’s not even close to being right. The most recent ABC News poll has Obama at 50; the vast majority of polls have had Obama’s job approval rating in the 40s — sometimes the high 40s, sometimes the mid-40s, and sometimes the low 40s — since January.