OK, so today is Barack Obama's 100th day in office. And we all know that the President is enjoying nearly unprecedented popularity, right? Right...?
Nope. The Washington Times never got the memo. News flash from their editorial today, aptly titled "Barack's in the basement": Obama is the least popular President in the last four decades! With the exception of Bill Clinton, of course:
Mr. Obama's current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.
This approval rating is allegedly taken from "Gallup's April survey." But clicking over to Gallup, there's just one little problem...
...which is that Gallup seems to think Obama is still, like, popular or something:
As President Barack Obama concludes his first 100 days on the job, Gallup Poll Daily tracking for the week of April 20-26 finds 65% of Americans approving of how he is doing and only 29% disapproving.
Reading a little further down, we might even discover where the Washington Times got their bad impression that Obama's ratings were so low:
Obama's strongest backers are blacks, with 96% saying they approve of the job he is doing. However, Hispanics are nearly as supportive, with 85% approving. Approval is a much lower 57% among whites -- but still a solid majority.
So it's simple, really. If you want to brand Obama as "unpopular," just report the "white" results as the overall poll results. Yeah, that still leaves him with an approval rating that's almost twice what Bush enjoyed when he left office, but that's details. Hey, America is still a white nation first and foremost, isn't it? Constitutional originalist thinking, and all that; those black and hispanic results really only count 3/5 anyway.
Bravo to the Washington Times, the print organ of the Bullshit Trifecta that so perfectly complements Fox on TV, and Hannity, Limbaugh and their ilk on right-wing hate radio. You may now carry on your gradual slide towards irrelevance, boys.
EDIT: A Whitney Brown points out in the comments that the Times editorial is almost certainly based on THIS Gallup poll, and not the one I cited.
Which means I need to pull back on calling out the Washington Times for racism, though I think it's still an extraordinary example of cherry-picking poll data to single out this poll and conclude that "Barack's in the basement."