All of the scuttlebutt this week emanated from a Bloomberg poll. There were more articles about that poll than you could shake a stick at, as my mom used to say. I never understood what that expression really meant except that it indicated great volume. Rather than deal in redundancy, I will link to this article from the NY Post which contains a link to the poll itself. The bottom line is really just the same old story, but it deepens each time we see the polls. Hillary Clinton is wildly popular. Obama becomes more unpopular by the day, buyer’s remorse grows among those who voted for him, and some would prefer Hillary to replace him on the Dem ticket in 2012. What is different this week? Their numbers are further apart, and the percentage of people who think she would have done a better job is a little better than a third of those polled. No surprise to anyone here. So just for the record, here is the Post article.
Hillary Clinton enjoys higher marks than President Obama: poll
POST WIRE SERVICES
Last Updated: 6:27 PM, September 16, 2011
Nearly two-thirds of Americans hold a favorable view of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — an indication that voters have buyers remorse when it comes to electing Barack Obama president, according to a new poll.
The survey, conducted for Bloomberg News, found that most people believe the country would be better off if she had become president in 2008.
At the same time, Obama’s job approval rating stands at a paltry 45 percent, the lowest of his presidency, the poll found.
Clinton is “more likable” to women — with a staggering 68 percent holding a favorable view, compared to 59 percent of men, according to the poll.
APA new poll reveals most voters think Hillary Clinton would have been a better president than Barack Obama.All age groups hold favorable views of the former first lady — although those 65 years and older are even more in love with her with 68 percent holding a favorable view, the poll found.
Well, it is hard not to be in love with someone who works so hard and so cheerfully and does such a terrific job! She is so easy on the eyes, as well.
For those who would like to see her accede to the Oval Office sooner rather than later, the dependably pro-Hillary Colleen O’Connor offers a route for 2012.
Colleen O’Connor: How Hillary Clinton Becomes President
The former presidential candidate’s fate is the commander-in-chief job.
- By Colleen O’Connor
- September 13, 2011
I know. I know.Hillary Clinton said the chances of her challenging President Barack Obama “are below zero,” according to CNN.She also said she won’t “run for the presidency.”
That doesn’t mean she won’t become president! And I am not talking about 2016.
Watch the special election for New York’s 9th District (Rep. Anthony Weiner’s old seat). That outcome could be a bigger upset than Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat.
Despite Maria Cardona’s response to Don Lemon on CNN this morning, when asked about a challenge to Obama, more Democrats appear to want that this week than last, or perhaps just want him to step aside. I do not think Maria can be speaking for the whole party when she says, “Capital N capital NO underscore exclamation point!” Some challenger could come out of the woodwork. It is a big party, and the current candidate has not proven that he is up to the job.
Still4Hill 
It all depends on if Obama can stand firm on Democratic principles and if he can get somethings in place to help those who are working hard or wishing they had a job to work hard at. If he crumbles to the pressure from the Teapublicans or can get anything going and fails to pin the blame securely on Republican intransigence, you’ll keep hearing people pin for Hillary Clinton – a woman who has been called many things, but never soft or weak of will.
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If Obama could do all of those things, he would already be doing them. Even if he were showing signs of learning from his mistakes, I think the public would be willing to give him more time. But the American people are HURTING. We can’t wait for Obama to finish his on-the-job training, if indeed he ever does. We also can’t afford to suffer through four years of President Rick Perry, hoping Hillary will run against him in 2016. Her time is now.
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There is little he can do to help his jobs package other than talk it up at this point. It’s just starting it’s journey through both houses of Congress and the Republicans need a little time to coalesce around a few reasons to oppose this bill that aren’t “Obama’s ideas = bad ideas. We hate Obama.” The American electorate needs a bit more substance than that. The fight hasn’t even begun over this or the Super Congress’ work. I agree that the public is impatient and that impatience is due to our economic strife, but there is little that can be done to speed up the process. Even the healthcare bill that was, according to conservative pundits “rammed through Congress”, took months to get passed. Parliamentary procedure does not have a warp drive. It takes time to get these things done. Things will start to get going this week and by October it will be in full swing and stay that way until around the holiday season. Then they’ll be hoping to either makes a big fuss over the present they’re giving working people and the unemployed, or hoping we’ll all be too busy with our festivities to notice their latest failure.
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And that was mistake number one. Pushing health care before jobs so that what? People have to wait till October now for the jobs arguments to start heating up?
*No ability to prioritize;
*No tough drive – collapses and folds to the GOP;
*No idea what it is really like out there is Jen’s neck of the woods (and everyone thinks he “saved the auto industry” but according to Jen Michigan is in very bad shape).
I have totally lost patience with him. Totally.
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I agree that he failed in the prioritization department when he put healthcare reform before getting America working again. It’s one of the reasons why he really needs to get a new crop of advisors and let the others move on to punditry and writing their administration exposés. He needs get away from the people who have been telling him things like he should start with healthcare and then move on to our nation’s massive unemployment problem.
I do disagree with you on one point. At the risk of sounding like an obnoxious, elitist New Englander, I don’t think that Michigan is a bellwether for the rest of the country. Different regions have different and unique characteristics. It may be a good indicator for its region, but I think a few more states in other regions would need to also show progress before he and Timothy Geithner (who should be replaced, by the way) can pull Dubya’s Mission Accomplished banner out of storage.
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The point I was making is that Jen IS from Michigan and she is saying that not only did the bailout of the auto industry NOT help, but that as far as she and her family and friends can see they are in a DEPRESSION! I never said Michigan was a bellwether for anything. Michigan, as far as what she is experiencing is NOT in recovery despite the heroic bailout. Correct me if I am wrong, Jen, but that is what I have understood, for many, many months.
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Sorry for getting you upset. One of your bullet points was that Obama doesn’t know what Michigan’s like these days, hence my bellwhether comment. Bailing out the auto industry only helped those in the corporate offices, the workers in foreign factories, and those who are fans of Chevy and Chrysler products.
To bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, he’d have to do something to discourage outsourcing which he has not touched and which the US Chamber of Commerce openly supports. Our economic issues do not stem from lack of money. The Federal Reserve pumped tons of it into the banking industry, but they are no confident enough in the economy to lend and they have good reason to be weary. The problem is that there has been little to no GDP growth and without growth there is no demand to prompt businesses to hire which would get more people paying taxes and putting money into the economy which would then start to recover. If there were a strong push to start repatriating our outsourced and it worked the economy would start to right itself again. Sadly, that’s the only thing Obama seems unwilling to try. You can add that to your collection of Obama Administration FAILs – I think it’s their biggest.
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Yes, I did, of course mean “bellwether” spelled the proper way. 🙂
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I thought you HAD spelled it correctly!
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I spelled it right in the first comment, but not the second.
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Whatever. Your field is economics. Do grad work in that. You get it. Seriously!
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A while ago you said I should work in the State Department in Cultural Affairs. Thanks for the votes of confidence! I really appriciate it.
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Culture and economics are related. In grad school you can tie them together. That’s your crossroad.
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I could be the Democrats’ version of Karl Rove!!!! (Only, once again, far cuter. 😉 )
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🙂
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You didn’t upset me. I just wanted my point to be clear – because really it’s Jen’s point and not mine They are suffering in Michigan.
Corollary: Based on that response, you should do your grad work in economics. You have the grasp.
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I’ve never been good at math but the theory of economics is number-free and therefore Discourse-friendly.
It all just seems obvious. I mean, everything works on a cause and effect basis – supply and demand, right? So if there are a lot of people un/underemployed and companies outsourcing jobs as fast as they can, then there’s less money flowing into the economy and demand for most goods and services eventually slows to a trickle. That’s the recession. It was triggered by the colapse of the housing bubble when people finally began running out of money for morgage payments.
Corporations are global now, so that explains their record profits. There are emerging markets which want GE appliances and, yes, Chevys and Chryslers, and they’re getting them. That’s the bailouts of various banks and the car companies.
And no matter what Mitt Romney says, corporations are not people. They aren’t evil forces of darkness either. They are like robots. They lack empathy and work on a binary, yes/no computation process. The US market isn’t profitable? Yes. Shed jobs to improve the cost to benefit ratio? Yes. That’s the crippling unemployment.
With so few jobs available and not many on the horizon, there is not much out the to encourage companies to expand because the risk of failure is higher than usual. There is also nothing to spur banks to make loans because, without a reason to be optimistic, why would the bank assume the someone who needs to ask for money now will have money to pay them back when the time comes. That’s the stagnation and, since businesses can’t expand, the only way that I can see things righting themselves is if companies who’ve spent the last decade sending American jobs to other countries have to bring at least some of them back or there is a very large, government sponsored work program like the WPA with enough oversight to prevent waste and fraud.
Our spending is another issue entirely, but it’s just as simple once you break it down and strip out the special interest lobbying and all those headache-inducing numbers.
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Save this! Save it as a document. You can edit this and use it as your personal statement for grad school. Definitely, you are headed in this direction.
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There is no need to correct you, Still. Everything you’ve said about Michigan is accurate. If there’s a recovery here, I sure don’t see it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Nevada has overtaken us as the #1 state for unemployment and foreclosures, but I hardly call that an improvement. The auto industry bailout might have helped a very small number of people, but it didn’t create a ripple effect. It’s not as if GM and Chrysler started building new plants and hiring new workers. The suppliers are all in China now. Housing values keep going down. People are leaving in droves.
Michigan may not be a bellwether for the rest of the country, but we are a swing state. I can easily imagine Romney winning here in 2012 and the other Repub candidates have a pretty good chance as well. We did elect a GOP governor in 2010.
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That should be scaring downticket Dems.
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The global nature of modern companies means that however heroic the auto bailout sounded on tv, it wasn’t all it was hyped up to be because most of the factory job are not in the US. It’s really sad.
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Evan in chicago paper they want him to step aside….
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/ct-oped-0918-chapman-20110918,0,5039308.story
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Yes – another Chicago voice chimes in. This one arrived too late for this post. Too many people had already seen the post and would have missed this. I will post it above the fold probably tomorrow.
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I posted it at some of the Facebook groups. It seems to be getting a good reaction so far.
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When the Chicago Tribune, the Obama’s hometown newspaper, writes an op-ed suggesting Obama withdraw and Hillary Clinton step in, I think it’s time to sit-up and pay attention.
Obama’s incessant need for Republican approval and his unwillingness to defend and protect such time-honored Democratic values such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, makes a whole lot of Americans nervous.
I have a 95 year year old grandmother who hasn’t received a COLA in 2 years and now she’s worried Obama’s debt reduction commission plans to slash her Medicare and Social Security. To do this to an elderly American is cruel.
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Bush 43 tried to privatize SocSec, and it scared a lot of people and didn’t happen. We called it “the politics of fear” at the time. Obama is going to suggest a teensy tax on the wealthiest – scaring no one really, and that won’t happen either – so to make up for what he is not going to get, he will probably offer up SocSec and Medicare/Medicaid “revision” on a silver platter without having been asked to by the Republicans. That makes Obama scarier to me and many than W ever was.
Keep your eye on Bill Clinton.
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And its not as if Obama is talking about “reforming” these programs with people who just want to tinker with them. This crop of Republicans want them gone. They may not believe in evolution, but they are huge supporters of social darwinism. That’s not the type of personwho I want to see messing with our social safety net.
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Isn’t it absurd how nearly all of those Repubs claim to be Christians yet their social policies are totally Darwinian? Oh yeah, they’ll talk about how they care about the poor, but they believe churches and private charities should be providing services, not the government. There are a lot of wonderful faith-based groups and secular charities, but they cannot meet everyone’s needs, nor do they have the wherewithal to provide services on a large scale the way the government can. They can feed a few hundred people here and a few hundred people there, or they can run a food pantry, or deliver meals on wheels to senior citizens. All of this is fine and good, but it cannot replace food stamps or free school lunches.
As for privatizing social security, I listened to their talk at that Tea Party Express debate. It *sounds* good. Apparently, it worked in Chile, but I’d have to study up on that before I’d believe it. But the bottom line is, the Repubs want us to put our $$$ into savings accounts at a time when the banks aren’t paying any interest. In the 1980s, one of my elderly cousins was able to live on the interest in her savings account alone. There’s no way anybody can do that now. CDs aren’t paying anything either. And without a social safety net, it doesn’t matter how much $$$ you have in your account– it can all be wiped out after one medical emergency.
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Scariest time I ever remember. Scarier that Nixon even.
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Wages have nearly flatlined for the past two decades for everybody but the wealthiest among us. Also, it’s reached a point that you can’t run for the nation’s highest offices unless you are rather well off. This has created a new golden rule – they that have the gold make the rules. It’s certainly not the golden rule my grandmother taught me.
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Not hardly!
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Hey Obama, remember this? “Hillary, you’re likable enough.” Right back at you, buddy!!! He ( or she in this case) who laughs last, laughs best.
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Karma’s a beeatch! Awwww… I remember that night and how she reacted, and I thought she was loveable!
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Seems she’s likable enough to be a political threat now.
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Awwwww…. I wanted to hug her that night. She was so cute and made a joke of it, but I think it did hurt her feelings. The question was as boorish and mean as could be. She “tried to go on” and did. She always shows up!
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I wonder what Bill Clinton thought of the question. Remember this?
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