Of late, there's been a few stories dwelling on the President's slowly declining (though still robust!) approval ratings. First came this recent poll of Ohio, then today's Ben Smith survey:Pollsters are debating whether Obama’s expansive and expensive policy proposals or the ground-level realities of a still-faltering economy are driving the falling numbers.But a source of the shift appears to be independent voters, who seem to be responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending and government control.“This is a huge sea change that is playing itself out in American politics,” said Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. “Independents who had become effectively operational Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are now up for grabs and are trending Republican.Schoen is going overboard here in predicting a "huge sea change" -- one useful rule about massive changes in public opinion is that they don't usually happen in less than a year. (You can get a sense of Schoen's credentials, incidentally, from the firm he started with his partner, Mark Penn. Remember him?). But there has been a down-tick in support for the president that shouldn't surprise anyone. The economy is still not doing great and unemployment continues to worsen. The president hasn't passed any huge piece of legislation in a few months. Republicans have been on the attack. The legislative process is messy, confusing and unsatisfying. And of course, the novelty always wears off.But these results don't suggest that the administration should change its course. They suggest that the administration should finish what it started -- on health care, on energy, on the budget, the stimulus and the banks -- to demonstrate that their approach works. False panic about deficits will only work as a message if it seems like those deficits were for nothing. But as more stimulus money is disbursed -- and very little of it has been so far -- the economy improves, and some of Obama's legislative projects become law, people will asses the president more positively. Of course, if the economy doesn't improve and health care reform doesn't pass, or, even worse, passes in an unsuccessful iteration, then the president should start to worry. That should be an incentive to focus more on results and less on symbolic bipartisanship, since at the end of the day nothing matters more than how policies affect voters.
-- Tim Fernholz
