2. Obama fares better than Republicans but his second term is entering a danger zone familiar to President George W. Bush. At some point, Voters stopped trusting Bush and essentially stopped listening to him. While Obama has a better handle on his base than GOP leaders, he is overly insulated by it. The president and his advisers rarely listen to advice beyond the self-fulfilling kind. Rather than change the culture of Washington as promised, Obama is a captive of it – in part because his liberal loyalists have convinced him that that the message he road to power was a lie. They help to destroy his audacity to hope for change.

Just 42 percent of the public approves of Obama’s performance, the lowest recorded by NBC/WSJ.
Likeability has long been Obama’s strength but now fewer people view him favorably (41 percent) than unfavorably (45 percent).
Only 37 percent of the public considers Obamacare a good idea, versus 47 percent who see it as a bad idea.

The pollsters attribute the dramatic decline to a series of setbacks, including the NSA spying scandal, Syria’s use of chemical weapons, the government shutdownand the failed Obamacare rollout. In each case, the president stumbled and dissembled.