According to Gallop
The current 41% approval rating from April 12-14 polling includes interviews conducted before and after Obama announced his plan for deficit reduction on Wednesday. It also comes in the same week Congress is voting on the 2011 budget deal reached last Friday. The deal did not seem to have an immediate effect on the way Americans viewed Obama, given his 44% approval rating in the three days prior to the agreement and his 46% rating in the initial days after the agreement.
http://www.gallup.com/...
So those are the numbers and we can expect the Republicans to bludgeon us with them over the next couple of days. The big question though is WHY are Obama's poll numbers tanking?
Scenario 1: Americans, especially independents, want deep budget cuts. Obama failed to provide them and is paying the price. This is how the Republican party will read this poll. This would make sense of the declining poll numbers once the details of the deal were released.
Scenario 2: Obama called for a tax increase close to April 15th. Under this scenario the blimp is simply grumbling about taxes. Given a couple of weeks it will disappear.
Scenario 3: The American people want their President to talk about one thing: Jobs. Obama introduced a 2012 budget that does not talk about jobs and is now paying the price. This could be a big problem. It doesn't look like anybody will be talking about jobs for quite some time. Worse this could play into the Republicans hand. Tax cuts for the wealthy do, not much, to create jobs but they do something. Talking about raising taxes without talking about jobs means that the President has no plan to create jobs.
Scenario 4: The scary black man. Under this scenario a good percentage of elderly Americans are not paying much attention to the Ryan budget. The first thing they hear about Medicare is Obama talking about reform. Obama becomes the scary black man trying to take their medicare away, no matter what the circumstances really are. This would indicate a long term problem, under the scary black man scenario independents who disapprove of Obama probably will not vote for him in any case.
Scenario 5: Obama is seen as showing little leadership on the budget deal and preemptively caving to Republicans. This is how some in the progressive community would like to read these numbers.
Needless to say we need more polling to find out what's going on. My personal guess is that we are in Scenario 3. High unemployment is not generalized throughout the English speaking world. Currently Canada is at 7.7% unemployment, New Zealand at 6.8 and Australia at 4.1%. Both Canada and Australia have lower unemployment rates than their historic averages. My guess is that Americans want a president that will stop telling them what this country can't do and start telling them how we will create jobs.