RasmussenReorts

THE PRESIDENCY: A confident President told Oprah Winfrey in a year-end interview, that he gives himself a "good, solid B-plus" for his first 11 months in office, crediting his administration with getting the economy on track, winding down the Iraq war, making the right call in Afghanistan, “resetting” America’s prestige in the world and making progress in halting development of nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea. Passage of health care reform would boost his grade to an A- he said. Bold words indeed from a chief executive who Gallup says has a job approval rating of only 47 percent of voters -- the lowest ranking for a president at this point in his first term since Gallup began conducting approval polls in 1938.The Rasmussen poll shows that 42% Strongly Disapprove of his performance, an Approval Index rating of minus 18. Somebody is on the wrong planet.

By Dennis Mullin

Obama’s Approval Index is at the lowest level yet recorded. And as the health care plan struggles in the Senate, and 56% oppose the plan working its way through Congress with just 40% favor it, that A-1 may also prove elusive. Overall, 44% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. That’s the lowest level yet measured for this president. Previously, his overall approval rating had fallen to 45% twice, once in early September and once in late November and 55% now disapprove.

BAD NEWS: Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats now offer their approval while 80% of Republicans disapprove. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, just 36% approve. Seventy-seven percent (77%) of liberals approve while 76% of conservatives disapprove. The bad news for the President is that there are a lot more conservatives in the country than liberals. However, he gets a bit of a boost because 57% of moderate voters still offer their approval. The President earns approval from 37% of White voters and 98% of African-American voters.

Those are dismal figures for the darling of the media, which all but anointed Obama as the greatest President ever before he even took the oath of office. And as if that wasn’t bad enough news for the self-loving Fourth Estate, the one person they live to hate the most, Sarah Palin is surging in public esteem with 46 percent of respondents having a favorable impression of the politician the liberals have declared the dumbest person to ever walk the face of the earth.

REMARKABLE: The polls were not quite the same. Gallup asked people what they thought of the job Obama was doing, not whether or not they liked him. Even with that caveat, though, the convergence between Obama and Palin is remarkable. There is no statistical difference between the one and the other. This represents a substantial gain in public esteem for Palin since she resigned as governor of Alaska in July, and a substantial decline for Obama over the same period.

Sarah Palin's been on a roll since the publication of her autobiography last month. "Going Rogue" is already the second-biggest seller among nonfiction books in history (only Bill Clinton's 2004 autobiography, "My Life," sold more copies in the first month), and could be No.1 before the end of her book tour, since her sales seem to be holding up better than his did. The book tour itself is a cultural phenomenon. At each stop hundreds, often thousands, of people have waited hours, sometimes days, to meet her.

VILIFIED: The turnabout in fortunes is all the more remarkable because no political figure in recent history has been subject to such vilification from the news media as Sarah Palin. No malicious rumor was too preposterous to report. No accomplishment was important enough to mention. Meanwhile, no presidential candidate or president has received more favorable press coverage than Barack Obama.

"President Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House," concluded a Pew Research study last May. Forty-two percent of stories in major newspapers and television news programs about Obama were favorable, compared to 22 percent for Bush and 27 percent for Clinton. "The press just acted like this guy walked on water," Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz said during the campaign.

GRUDGING: That's changing, in both directions. Sarah Palin interrupted her book tour to speak at the Gridiron Club, the biggest social event of the year for Washington journalists. "The very fact she was willing to take the chance of appearing in a room full of her most disdainful critics is testimony to her courage," wrote Dan Thomasson of Scripps Howard. "She came away with at least a consensus of grudging admiration." "Her appearance produced the extraordinary scene of inside-the-Beltway cynics and their significant others asking for autographs," Mr. Thomasson noted.

"Palin won the evening," conceded columnist Clarence Page. "As much as her politics are not mine, after chatting with her and her husband, good-natured 'First Dude' Todd Palin, I came away with a new fondness and respect for both of them," Page wrote.

"Going Rogue" received savage reviews from most liberals, like that from Ana Marie Cox in The Washington Post, who acknowledged she hadn't actually read the book.

Stanley Fish, writing for The New York Times, described it as "compelling and very well done." The reaction of liberals to Sarah Palin -- which is like that of vampires to garlic -- indicates she is the Republican they fear most.

With good reason, Fish thinks. "Perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin's character," he wrote. "Her political opponents, especially those who dismissed Ronald Reagan before he was elected, should take note."

INTELLIGENSIA: Part of the problem is that the self-appointed “intelligentsia” which comprises the bulk of the liberal establishment, believes that everyone who is not part of their close inner circle is an idiot. Author Thomas Sowell chimes in on that theme noting that, "George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Symptomatic of the dilemma Obama finds himself in, is that the core of his support, as noted in the numbers listed above, is made up of those who truly believe that they won a mandate last year to engineer, and the moral imperative to implement, a sweeping, dramatic change in the way everyone else lives their lives. That is crystallized by the global warming mantra now playing itself out in Denmark – where the global climate talks reek of hypocrisy.

SUDAN: The latest walkout came from African countries who are demanding that the major industrial countries virtually dismantle their economic systems so that everyone can be equally poor. Sudan, which is guilty of horrific genocide of the citizenry of Darfur, led the protest complaining that the West wasn’t giving it enough money to offset the results of the as yet scientifically unproven consequences of man-made climate change. It would presumably use the money to offset the effects of its non-existent industry, and not to kill more innocent civilians.

Sowell notes: “There are so many places where they've had record-low temperatures. They had snow in Houston the earliest they've ever had. The last record was five inches; they got 20 inches. What used to amuse me a lot in recent years is when they had scheduled a global warming conference; and had to cancel it because of the cold.”Appropriately, a “blizzard” was declared today in Copenhagen where four inches of snow fell.

DUTY BOUND: But Obama is duty bound by his base electoral political support to press ahead with the nationalization of industry, global warming taxes and a health care overhaul that the majority of Americans clearly do not want to see. He has steadfastly refused to follow the Clinton model and “triangulate” and rule from the center to balance left and right wing preferences.

Sowell has written a book on the subject, titled "Intellectuals and Society." His bottom line: intellectuals, unlike normal people, are unaccountable for what they do, and as a result are unconstrained when it comes to foolishness.Therefore, he concludes, immeasurable damage is done by intellectuals who pontificate, but avoid the consequences of the tripe they pass off as wisdom from on high.

Sowell narrowly defines an "intellectual" as someone whose "work begins and ends with ideas," holding forth from ivory towers, and sounding off from the cozy confines of newspaper editorial offices.

GREAT THINKERS: Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register agrees with Sowell on the fact that “academicians, the opinion-spewing media and other self-professed great thinkers are alike in that they produce ideas, rather than create products or services. Sowell doesn't include among his definition of intellectuals people who, if measured by sheer brainpower would seem to qualify for the designation, such as doctors whose intellectual contribution is delivered in the operating room, engineers whose work product is bridges or researchers who develop vaccines.

These intellectual types contribute more than ideas. They produce real things for which they can be held accountable if the patient dies, the bridge collapses or the vaccine kills rather than immunizes.”

He continues: But intellectuals, in Sowell's sense of the word, are rarely if ever held accountable for the fruits of their labor, no matter how rotten. Forty years ago, environmentalist Paul Ehrlich infamously predicted worldwide food shortages and mass starvation. Instead, as Sowell noted, obesity is epidemic and there are "unsalable agricultural surpluses," yet Ehrlich continued to receive popular acclaim, honors and grants from prestigious academic institutions.

PREDICTIONS: Public policies predicated on such baseless predictions have dire results for society, including misuse of scarce resources, wasteful spending and the dangers of ignoring real threats when we are diverted by phony threats. The faux threat of global warming comes to mind.

“On this score, the media, like our counterparts in academia, bear great responsibility. In his new book and in an interview with the Register Editorial Board, Sowell discussed the media's `filtering out of facts, the redefinition of words and, for some intellectuals, challenging the very idea of truth itself," Landsbaum says.

AGENDAS: “Sowell’s book recounts preconceived agendas advanced by an elitist media, who like academicians, regard themselves as an anointed class, capable of prescribing solutions for areas of life in which they have no first-hand experience. Not only is this function performed by opinion writers who distort reality, but also by self-proclaimed impartial reporters who filter, slant and misrepresent.”

“In 1983 when unemployment was improving in 45 states, Sowell recalls, ABC News chose to feature a report on one of the five states where that was not so, or as they put it, 'where unemployment is most severe.'" His book also recalls the sanitizing of the homeless during the 1980s by quoting Bernard Goldberg from his days at CBS News when the reporter "started noticing that the homeless people we show on the news didn't look very much like the homeless people I was tripping over on the sidewalk. The ones on the sidewalk, by and large, were winos or drug addicts or schizophrenics. But the ones we liked to show on television were different. They looked as if they came from your neighborhood and mine. They looked like us."

WORLDVIEW: "The media," Sowell told us, "is moderated somewhat today in advancing its generally uniform leftist worldview by talk radio, the Fox News channel and best-selling conservative authors because publishers like to make money, and their books are hugely popular. Then there's the Internet. The big thing about the Internet is that it makes it impossible to filter as completely as otherwise," he said.

"Just imagine if we'd had the three major broadcast networks only, no cable, no Fox News, no Internet. We probably would not have heard about the climate thing in East Anglia -- like it never happened," he said, alluding to the leak of thousands of secret documents from an English research facility published on the Internet that suggests data may have been manipulated to advance the theory of global warming.

"Like the famine in Russia in the '30s," Sowell said, "It never happened as far as the New York Times is concerned." During the 1930s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize after reporting: "There is no famine or actual starvation in  the Soviet Union, nor is there likely to be."

But a Soviet state-imposed starvation was killing millions. Indeed, at the time Duranty was telling others privately that he believed it "quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food," Sowell wrote.

LEFT-LEANING: The vision of the left-leaning media, however, preferred to portray the Soviet Union as the world's foremost model of progressive policies. When British writer Malcolm Muggeridge reported accurately on the Russian starvation, he was "vilified and unable to get work as a writer."

Still, Sowell anticipates mainstream media's predetermined response. The usual reaction to most of my writing is that they just simply ignore it. And they proceed as if I've never said anything," he told us. "I've now shown you the world is round, and if they want to say it's flat, they'll just go on saying it's flat and say, 'Thomas who?'"

FAWNING PRESS: Perhaps that explains the situation Obama finds himself in. Surrounded by a fawning press and a couturier of intellectual advisers who thoroughly believe in the righteousness of their causes, he can with a straight fact say that he is doing a “strong B-plus job, despite the fact that the people at large think he is dangerously over his head and doesn’t really understand the damage he is causing the system.

In Harvard Yard and at East Anglia University, he is doing at strong high-grade job. But to mainstream America, it is Sarah Palin that is making more sense, with straight talk about the dangers of mortgaging the national future on pipe-dreams and faulty climate computer models, and on business models that have proven time and again not to work.