OBAMA'S JOB APPROVAL RATING TUMBLES

Dear Leader's job approval rating took a hit over the weekend, falling to its lowest level in the Gallup three-day average since his reelection.

His approval rating was 46 percent between Feb 29 and March 2, down from 53 percent a week earlier.

The drop comes after Obama and Congress failed to reach a last-minute deal and automatic sequester cuts kicked in across the government on Friday.

His disapproval rating also jumped to its highest level since November, hitting 46 percent over the weekend, up from 40 percent a week earlier.

Gallup surveys roughly 1,500 adults across the nation each day and records the average ratings over three days. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points.

As John Nolte at Breitbart points out:

This could again be statistical noise or related directly to the sequester negotiations. As much as Democrats and the media want to blame the GOP, people still see Obama as in charge. Moreover, thanks to conservative media and a very few brave mainstream media journalists willing to tell the truth, the president's credibility has taken a real hit.

More than once, Obama and his White House have been caught telling bald-faced lies about Obama's role in birthing sequester, how much discretion he has over spending cuts,  and the crying of wolf over what to expect when the cuts hit. 

We also have the matter of the economy, which may be worsening to a point where the media is no longer able to happy talk it into something other than a political liability for Obama and his failed policies.

If a majority of the media won't hold Obama responsible for his lies and failed economic policies, maybe this poll shows the public finally will.

Something else that has been happening over the past couple of weeks is the increasing frustration with Obama that the Establishment Media is experiencing and beginning to share with the people.  They still prefer him to anybody else but there's only so much arrogance and abuse that unrequited love can suffer before the complaining starts.

And as Obama begins to reap the whirlwind for his own actions, there are plenty of other realities that should comfort Republicans.  Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard lists the positives:

Helpful political advice should first of all be practical, taking into account what can and cannot be done. What, for instance, can the Republican party accomplish between now and the next election? To do that, we should first take a political inventory, to see where the GOP stands.

On the plus side of the ledger, we have the party’s strength in the states. Republicans control 30 governorships, including in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. What’s more, the GOP holds a majority of state legislative seats, roughly 52 percent nationwide. All told, Republicans have unified control of 25 states, with 53 percent of the nation’s population. Compare that with the Democrats, who control 13 states with 30 percent of the American public.

Republicans also control the House of Representatives and retain enough seats to filibuster in the Senate. Not only that, but the 234 House Republicans still constitute a larger caucus than at any point during the Republican “revolution” of the mid-1990s. While this number is down from 2010, the last two cycles have produced the strongest GOP House majority since the Great Depression.

Finally, the Republican coalition is reasonably united. Naturally, there are fissures—notably, the divide between the so-called establishment wing of the party and the Tea Party “opposition.” Nevertheless, historical perspective is appropriate here. While the media like to play up today’s divisions, the party remains generally united around a set of policy goals—tax reform and sensible deregulation to jump-start the economy, entitlement reform to solve the debt crisis, the expansion of domestic energy production, and so on. One could not say the same of the Republicans after Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 or Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964.