is obama defying gravity?

Photo: White House/Flickr.

Normally, a president's popularity closely tracks perception of the job he's doing on the economy. So far, this isn't true of Obama. ABC's Amy Walter notes an historically unusual disjunction between Obama's overall approval rating and his rating for economic management:

In the ABC /Washington Post poll, his overall approval rating was seven points higher than his approval rating on the economy. In the CBS/New York Times poll, the gap between his overall approval rating and his handling of the economy was 8 points.
 
Obama’s job approval ratings defy political gravity. The only question now, is if they can do so for much longer. Psychologists talk about “cognitive dissonance,” the tension that people feel when their thoughts are inconsistent with one another.  In this case, it’s feeling as if the president is doing a pretty lousy job on the economy, but still giving him decent (though not glowing) marks when it comes to his overall presidency.

I'm not sure this a case of cognitive dissonance, actually. I think what it tells us is that voters have longer memories than we sometimes give them credit for. Although voters are frustrated with the president for not being able to lift the country out of its malaise - and although they may actually blame him for it, when asked - I think at some level they remember that he didn't make this mess; he inherited it.

Comments

[rsrs]

But why would that work for Obama specifically and not every first-term incumbent anywhere?

[Marbury]

Depends on timing of term vs economic cycle/events.

[rsrs]

So Obama has had the good fortune to get elected at a juncture wherein the normal economic determinism is suspended in regard to public perception of presidential performance? McCain or Clinton would have got the same break?

Personally, I'm inclined to think that the gap between his performance on the economy and his approval rating in general is best explained by the fact that he wasn't a practical candidate to begin with. He won a cultural victory, so to speak, appealing to cultural values, even moral instincts, and was allowed to do so by a Republican party unable to adopt a convincing position on the economy.

[Lyle]

Well, I doubt the poll included people in areas such as Ohio. I just spent five scary days there visiting my husband's extended family. I heard comments ranging from "It's all gone downhill since He came into power" (uttered by a born-again Christian woman in her 60s who actually believes that Obama is the anti-Christ, so she never refers to "Him" by name - !) to "Obama just wants to spend and spend and spend and drive this country into the ground; it's his revenge for not letting us turn into a socialist state" (henh?!). These folks have college degrees; however, they don't read newspapers (or anything much aside from bibles and faith-related texts) and instead rely on Faux News to stay "informed". Hmmm.