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By Nile Gardiner World Last updated: December 22nd, 2009

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Barack Obama gave himself a B+ on Oprah Winfrey’s White House Christmas Special on ABC, but the American public is far less generous. The latest influential Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of likely US voters gives Obama a thumping 56 percent disapproval rating – an F grade by any measure. 46 percent strongly disapprove of the president’s job performance, while just 25 percent strongly approve. That’s a Presidential Approval Index rating of -21 percentage points, a staggering figure for a president just 11 months into his term of office.

These are historically low approval ratings for a US president, that concur with those released by several other pollsters, including NBC News/Wall Street Journal, who recently reported a 47 percent approval for Obama, and Quinnipiac and Marist, both at 46 percent.

The latest Gallup Survey gives Obama just 50 percent approval, lower than any president in the first December of his first term in the post-war period, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in 1981, at 49 percent, who inherited a country literally brought to its knees by the Carter presidency before later restoring it to greatness. Reagan eventually left office with a 68 percent approval.

At the same stage of their presidencies, George W. Bush polled at 81 percent approval, John F. Kennedy at 77 percent, George H.W. Bush at 71 percent, Dwight Eisenhower at 69 percent, Richard Nixon at 59 percent, Jimmy Carter at 57 percent, and Bill Clinton at 53 percent. Significantly, it wasn’t until his second term that President George W. Bush’s approval ratings began to sink to the levels currently experienced by Obama.

Barack Obama’s health care reform legislation is playing a major part in driving the high negativity ratings. 54 percent of voters surveyed by Rasmussen “believe they will be worse off” if the health care Titanic is approved by Congress, with just 25 percent believing they will be better off. 57 percent of voters now say that “it would be better to pass no health care reform bill this year instead of passing the plan currently being considered by Congress.” As the RealClearPolitics summary of polls demonstrates, the Obama health care plan is hugely unpopular.

The latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll reflects widespread disenchantment in the United States with the leftward direction Barack Obama is trying to take the country. As recent Gallup surveys have shown, America remains a predominantly conservative nation, with less than a quarter of Americans identifying themselves as liberal. In fact, the United States is shifting even more to the right under Obama, with a significant revival in the strength of the conservative movement. This poll should be a wake-up call for the White House, if it still mistakenly believes that a radical left-wing agenda can be sold to the American people.

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