Newsmaker
Poll: Obama's 1st year gets mixed verdict
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-20 21:56
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WASHINGTON: You're likable enough, Barack.
But while nearly nine in 10 people like President Barack Obama personally, he earns decidedly mixed reviews in a new Associated Press-GfK poll judging his first year in office, a verdict darkened Tuesday by a stunning repudiation of his party in the Massachusetts Senate race.
His approval ratings have been becalmed for months, 56 percent in the survey out Wednesday. By a modest margin, people still think the country is moving in the wrong direction, as they have since summer. And the Republican upset in Massachusetts demonstrated just how perilous the political landscape has become.
Even three-quarters of Republicans say they personally like Obama.
But such personal good will came to little in Massachusetts, where Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in a race seen as a referendum on Obama's first year in office as well as on his health care initiative.
A president's likability can be a precious political commodity, but it proved to be one without coattails in the Senate contest.
To be sure, the excitement of Obama's inauguration and the inflated expectations of that time are gone. His approval ratings have been in the 50s since July, sliding from 74 percent a year ago.
Hopes that he would become an extraordinary president have been tempered during a year of economic calamity, an escalating war in Afghanistan and sharp elbows in the health care debate, the poll suggests.
Fading, too, though, are worries that Obama is in over his head.
Fewer Americans register a concern that the former one-term Illinois senator is doing too much too fast in the White House or lacks the gravitas to take on big problems. Even some people who don't like his policies credit him with a capable approach.
"I think he's on top of things," said Ken Jensen, 66, a retired economist in Woods Cross, Utah, and a Republican. "I admire him for his ability to put on a different necktie and approach a different problem in a competent way."
An opponent of Obama's plans for health care and much else, Jensen said the president is doing right by Haiti and, in responding to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner, "got it right" after a bumbling start on the first major domestic terrorism challenge of his presidency.
