Last month during the alarming images of rising water levels in the streets of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, due to a surprising and historic flooding, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence raced to Baton Rouge in order to promote an eager media narrative that he was more concerned about the citizens of Baton Rouge than President Barack Obama who, Republicans would have you believe, was neglectful of the people of Baton Rouge by remaining on his vacation as flood waters damaged homes.
What Republicans and their allies in the media failed to specifically disclose, however, was that the President had asked Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards for an appropriate time for a presidential visit and it was requested by the governor that he waited:
EDWARDS: But I’ve been talk (ph) — the White House asked me — in fact, the president and Valerie Jarrett asked me when would be a good time for a visit. I asked them to let us get out of the response mode where we were still conducting searches of houses, and we were still making rescues. I didn’t want to divert these police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers and other essential resources and assets to providing security for the president while they were needed in this region to undergo those — or to undertake those response activities. And I asked that if he could wait until the response was over and we got into the recovery phase, which I predicted we would do over the weekend and certainly next week would be a better time for us to visit.
This was an inconvenient fact for the media, which employed a nifty device for criticizing the President known as “OPTICS”. The fact that the President was diligent in his efforts to provide federal assistance, and swift in his deployment of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has received praise by Louisiana officials, was of little importance. Here, the liberty to criticize based on the tactic of “OPTICS” took precedence over the assessment of effective crisis management.
This criticism of the President was of tremendous value to Republicans, who have always been in search of that elusive catastrophe known as the "Obama Katrina".
The President’s approval rating has been polling above 50 percent for some time now and Republicans have been eager to bring down his popularity with the public. They have been trying desperately through their trumpeting of the “Obama paying Iran money for hostages” canard, which induced Republican political analyst Mark Halperin to declare:
The significance of this for the presidential race is Republicans have to get President Obama’s approval ratings down. They have to. And this is one of the things they’re going to talk about to try to bring that about.
Well, despite manufactured controversies and blatantly mendacious declarations from Republicans such as RNC chair Reince Priebus, who has repeatedly said:
We're paying the price for Obama's failed, liberal policies.
The Republican propaganda machine is failing and they are in deep trouble. I would have been more than delighted to see the President’s approval rating holding steady at 50 percent in current polls, but the latest Washington Post poll hints at greater possibilities:
[T]he Post-ABC poll finds 58 percent of Americans overall approve of President Obama’s job performance, the highest since July 2009 and continuing the positive movement since December when he stood at 45 percent.
Judging by some of their respondents’ over the top analysis of his time in office, it should be noted that individuals who register disfavor with the President are among the most extreme subset of anti-Obama voters, which also bodes well for the President and November:
Underscoring the passionate negative views that voters have of the candidate they oppose this year, nearly 8 in 10 Americans who disapprove of Obama say he has done real damage to the country.
The Post-ABC poll was conducted Sept. 5-8 among a random national sample of 1,002 adults reached by cellular and landline phones.
Emphasis on respondents’ idiotic statement by diarist.
There is also this from CNN:
In a reflection of rising optimism, 53% of Americans say economic conditions in the US are good, up from the 45% who felt that way in June. It's the highest number since September 2007, before the 2008 economic collapse.The poll also showed that President Barack Obama continues to have majority approval ratings, at 51%. His approval rating has been at or above 50% since February, the longest stretch of his presidency since his first year in office.
Despite years of proclaiming Barack Obama a failure, the latest spate of opinion polls on the President’s popularity is proving that the lying narrative of the Republican Party is being soundly rejected by the nation. From all appearances thus far, they are facing dire prospects.