"It's his Titanic moment. He's hit the iceberg, but they keep acting like no water is coming into the ship."

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.