Still unclear is whether Obama's slide in the polls is due solely to his policies, or questions about his personal background or allegiances.It is not unclear. It's "all of the above."
The article is swimming in left-wing bias. Take this, for example:
...in which some conservatives accused him of socialismWe've been accusing him of socialism since he entered the race. It's now obvious to anyone with an above 4th-grade reading-level that the accusations (at the time considered smear-tactics) are true.
And then there's:
But the drop in support among whites also comes as some conservatives have stoked controversies...By stoking controversies, he means, "reporting on the facts," but let's not quibble on the details, eh?
One such episode came to a head Sunday when Van Jones, Obama’s green jobs czar, resigned after a week of criticism over past inflammatory statements and for signing onto conspiracy theories questioning whether the U.S. government played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. A White House official acknowledged Sunday that Jones had been vetted less rigorously than other officials.Jones was vetted "less rigorously" than, say, the other dozen people who resigned or couldn't pass Congressional scrutiny. That's rich. The "past inflammatory statements" was a nice touch, too, and lets on to how the Democrats are going to spin that one in the future: It was in the past they'll say, and don't we all have skeletons in our past? It wasn't representative of how he is now. Silly conservatives, always predicting future behavior by actual evidence of the past behavior, rather than those hope-and-changey emotions!
There are a few more examples given how those mean-old conservatives have stoked fires, ending in:
These controversies have followed conspiracy theories that the president was born overseas and is ineligible to hold office, and that his true religion is Islam -- false rumors that some Democrats worry could be affecting the public's view of the president and his party.Nice one, but the public is no longer buying it. Trying to lump legitimate criticisms in with the small segment of extremists worked until Democrats started accusing Tea Party attendees of being nutters. Those are people's friends and neighbors they've been slandering. The complicit media have to cover the President and hiding Obama's faults and disasters is getting more and more difficult. Blaming someone else for your troubles works for a while, but Americans really do believe that "the buck stops with the President."
What's important to remember is that Americans are willing to give a new President some slack, and expect a few stumbles as they get their Administration staffed. It becomes difficult to continue to blame Obama's mistakes on newness or staff ineptitude. Eventually, the only reasonable conclusion is that the flattering opinion of Obama was a mistake. The flattery was based on Obama being an unknown quantity, with people reading into the blank slate what they wanted to see. That's no longer the case.
During the campaign it was possible for Team Obama to distance the candidate from his socialist sympathies (few actually researched Obama's voting record or took seriously his association with former-criminals, his friendliness for left-wing dictators, or read his American-apologist/ progressive agenda spelled out in his books). But this (despite the White House staff confusion on the matter) is no longer Candidate Obama. He is now President Obama and the people ready to give him a pass for his history can't dismiss the reality appearing on the news every night.
I'll go so far as to make a prediction: While Obama will have a bit of a roller-coaster ride in the polls over the coming years, the general trend will be lead balloon. He won't get renominated by his own Party.
I don't know of a precedent for a President becoming a lame duck in their first year in office, but Obama has always been about beating odds. If Obama is half as smart as his supporters thought he was, he'll feign some sort of illness to allow him to step aside. I'm not certain that a narcissist of Obama's league can handle being loathed by so many.
When a politician can make Joe Biden seem like a brilliant statesman, you have to know how bad things really are in reality land.
H/t Instapundit.
Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).
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