Barack Obama still enjoys a comfortably high approval rating and the higher it stays the more political power he is likely to wield. You can get stuff done even if your numbers decline but it gets harder. George W. Bush's plans for Social Security "reform" were dead on arrival, in part, because he had long since used up his political capital. Here are Obama's numbers from Pollster.com:
Obama's approval rating shows a slow steady decline. This is not unexpected. First, there's almost always a high-starting honeymoon period folowed by a decline. Second, he has pursued a very aggressive agenda and the more you try to change the more enemies you can expect to make. But given the times, most Americans remain hungry for change and I would attribute most of his small decline to the former.
When considering these approval numbers the questions arises: how does this compare to past Presidents? That part is ahead.
As I mentioned above, a President usually starts off with a very high number which begins either a slow or precipitous drop. Here's a nice graphic from WSJ.com which shows the pattern for the previous 11 administrations:
It's hard to see in this graph but George W. Bush had a pattern not too disimilar to Obama's. He was in the low 60s early on and declined down to about 50 percent just before 9/11 and the "rally around the President" effect.
One interesting observation from this graph: Presidents used to start off their terms with enormous goodwill. Even putting aside Harry Truman's starting numbers, President's in the 1950s and 60s enjoyed very strong initial support. That seems to have changed in the 1970s and in more recent cases, you start somewhere between 55 and 60 percent.
Obama's starting point, above 70 percent in some polls and above 65 percent according to the Pollster trend line, is a return to the pre-Nixon pattern. Perhaps cynicism, for a time, has lifted.
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