At this point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had 42 percent approval and was headed to a low of 37 percent. Clinton was at 42 percent, headed to a low of 39 percent. George W. Bush was at 76 percent approval. Truman was at 34 percent.

Source: Reality Check - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Obama is at 47%. For a while I was very concerned about this, but in recent months I’ve become rather non-plussed about Obama. Don’t get me wrong, nice guy, overall good ideas, makes a fine speech, but really a 50% approval rating seems about right, in that it represents ‘meh’. He’s doing ‘all right’. He’s moving things in a reasonable direction, but failing to overhaul things as radically as his core support base expected, and probably not as substantially as they need to be. As The Guardian nicely summarised this week: “His relentless pursuit of a middle ground has dismayed the left of his own party, yet the Republicans have portrayed him as an extremist anyway.” For me though, it’s the BP/Oil Spill events that is the first time I’ve considered him acting ‘weak’.

Weak, not because he didn’t somehow ‘kick BP’s ass’ in the right way, but because he pandered into the media’s ridiculously distracting blame game, even so far as the disconcertingly xenophobic play on BP’s British origins (which, being a Brit, puts me out of joint a bit anyway, but since BP has been 40% American owned since 1998, a truly global corporate entity, it’s also bollocks.) Failing to blame someone hard enough is not the reason for weakness. Going along with a major narrative of blame at all is the weakness. In the face of a disaster that is certainly the fault of negligence somewhere down the line, you will find that there is all the time in the world to blame and compensate, whereas there is very little time to actually minimise the effect of the disaster itself.

Obama has always appeared strongest when he stands up for his convictions and previously has been happy to tell the media to shove it when they run with a bullshit lede. He has also always been a strong proponent of science and engineering. The thing about the oil spill is that implementing a solution that will work (oil caps, relief wells, undersea robots that do the work, even salvaging the oil) is a monumental and—to me—incredible engineering undertaking, requiring collaboration and outright brilliance to achieve at all, let alone on an ASAP timeline. Many of the engineers involved will work for BP, many will be drafted in from agencies and elsewhere. The public at large do not understand that because most of our engineering R&D goes into finding new ways of blowing one another up, we don’t possess instant solutions to disaster scenarios like this. It’s the simple truth that there existed no way for BP or anyone to plug that leak on day zero. There’s no secret island complex of conveniently specific rescue tools waiting to bail us out. Yet American’s expectations have been led by the media to believe that it was someone’s fault that the leak was not plugged instantly. That’s wrong. Whilst it’s clearly likely someone’s fault that the leak started; plugging it is an entirely separately problem. Obama was weak because he has encouraged a media misrepresentation of the situation in place of the actual truth about how engineering works. He has allowed Americans with no understanding of engineering to believe in conspiracies as to why the leak wasn’t plugged sooner, and has massively devalued the real achievement of plugging the leak at all. To top it off he’s left himself open to attacks from proponents of the narrative of not applying enough blame to this actually blameless phase.

Obama’s biggest strength was that he stood up to (or outright ignored) the batshit-stupid noise that disproportionately dominates America. Media here not only panders to the stupid, but outright encourages it. I hope that Obama’s recent deviation is just a blip, because truth and facts and proportionality were defining differences between him and everyone else in politics. It was a difference that mattered and made me actually care. Via: The Atlantic.