Perhaps the best news for President Obama in Fox News’ fresh national survey is that his overall job approval stands at (42/53); weak, yes, but slightly better than Quinnipiac and Bloomberg’s latest numbers, which peg his approval rating in the high 30s. But that’s where the relatively good news ends. Our lame duck-in-chief is underwater by double digits on every issue polled, from race relations, to foreign policy, to the economy. Note well the two issues on which he achieves the highest levels of public disapproval:
Roughly six in ten Americans oppose the president’s handling of healthcare and immigration, both of which have been in the news lately. Given the choice between keeping Obamacare intact and repealing the whole law, voters choose the latter option by a wide margin (38/58). This suggests that liberals’ excitement over other polling indicating broad support for ‘fixing’ or changing Obamacare, rather than scrapping it altogether, is misplaced. A substantial majority of Americans know that on balance, this law is fundamentally flawed. That’s not a “branding” problem, as Kathleen Sebelius would have us believe, nor is a product of Obamacare’s historically botched rollout (Harry Reid’s preferred delusion). The law simply is not working. Fox’s survey finds that twice as many Americans have been directly harmed by the law than have been helped by it, which is right in line with other polling on that question. There’s no spinning direct harm:
Many in the “no difference” crowd are likely people with employer-sponsored coverage, who haven’t lost their plans under Obamacare. Just wait awhile, guys. The Obama administration’s own internal projections anticipated that 93 million Americans will eventually be stripped of their ‘grandfathered’ coverage, Jon Gruber helpfully explained that the so-called ‘Cadillac tax’ will encroach on many more plans than Democrats indicated, and then there’s this:
Santa Claus is going to be bringing lots of presents in a couple of weeks, but lower health-insurance costs for most Americans won’t be one of them. People with insurance through an employer—that is, most people with health coverage—are paying “more in premiums and deductibles than ever before” as those costs outpace the growth of wages, a new report finds…despite a recent slowdown in costs that coincided with the adoption of the Obamcare health-care reform law in 2010, the price of job-based coverage is still rising faster than incomes, according to the report.
As for immigration, while 63 percent of respondents continue to support a legal path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, a majority (43/51) disapproves of the policy outcome of Obama’s executive amnesty. Even fewer Americans are fans of the process by which the president went about “changing the law,” as he put it:
Ironically, Obama would have been with the 54 percent majority on that second question until quite recently. Fully 74 percent of voters believe Obama’s actions will “result in more people entering the United States illegally,” while 68 percent say they are at least somewhat concerned that Obama’s arrogation of executive power is permanently altering the Constitution’s separation of powers. Which is why we might as well close by revisiting this clip:
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