A trio of polls released yesterday shows the harsh reality from which the embattled President Obama and the media hoped to deflect by fabricating a “War on Women.”
The newest Washington Post/ABC poll shows that the majority of Americans strongly disapprove of the way in which the President is handling a number of issues, chief among them the economy and gas prices. According to the March 10th, 2012 poll released yesterday a net 50% of those surveyed disapprove of how Obama is handling the job of president with 39% “strongly disapproving” and only 28% “strongly approving.” This is up from the net 46% taken on February 4th of the same year.
On the economy, 50% “strongly disapprove” whereas only 20% “strongly approve” of the President’s management. His negatives greatly outweigh his positives on everything from his handling of Iran, the budget deficit, Afghanistan, and on “the situation with gas prices” where 52% “strongly disapprove” of his job performance. It represents an increasing trend.
The latest New York Times/ CBS News poll:
At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.
The last of the trio comes from Rasmussen which illustrates how a full 59% of the country view Obama as “more liberal” than they are themselves.
It’s a bad day for optics in the White House, and a bad day for the administration’s strategy of deflecting from these awful truths with an elaborately-staged press conference on contraception designed to divert attention away from a two-pronged failure: the attack on the free practice of religion by way of abridging employers’s freedom to choose faithfully against providing “free” contraception, and the sinking confidence in the President concerning his mismanagement of the nation’s economy and energy policies.
These polls show that the administration’s weeks-long assault with a trumped-up narrative has failed. The administration’s “hurt and rescue” (cause a problem while simultaneously pretending to be the savior from the problem while acting as though your actions are mutually exclusive) tactic has failed in that the predictability and sheer silliness gave it away. For the Democrat party to reach into its bag all the way back to the 1960s for a strategy that can save this President from the misfortunate of his own executive choices reeks of desperation.
Many women see as a greater threat to their freedom the administration’s insistence that employers—many of whom are also female—compromise their religious beliefs to provide for the contraceptive choices made freely by other women, women who can empower themselves by paying for their choices themselves. It’s not “feminist” to demand that another woman carry the yoke of your free choices. Women see it as a threat the administration’s refusal to ease the higher costs at the pump, costs which eat away at our budget for groceries, summer clothes for our children, and bills which go towards providing rooftops over our families’ heads. The President’s refusal to act on the Keystone XL Pipeline could bring a handful of jobs to my blue collar family members alone and give my aunts, cousins, and female friends greater financial independence with paid, private enterprise, free market work that wouldn’t cost the public a dime. We also see it as a threat to our families the administration’s failure to provide clear objectives in Afghanistan while our family members overseas perform their duties in the scorching heat as our President authorizes more of our grocery money towards propping up a publicly-financed and US trained Afghan military.
If we’re going to talk about a “war on women,” the only one I see is the one above, the policy decisions I’ve listed—and I could enumerate further. If the incumbent wants to win a second term, focus on fixing what’s broken—the barrier between big government and private enterprise—and staying out of what isn’t. There’s no need to purposefully victimize women for the sake of using them as pawns in an election. That itself is an act of war on women.
