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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Popularity v. Leadership ... Our Popular President

According to a new poll released today, President Obama is much more popular than either Democrats or Republicans. He's seen as working to unify the country in a bipartisan way. WOW!

I wonder how well the popular President would poll if he were to recommend a serious change in either how we finance or derive benefits from our existing unaffordable entitlements programs.

Oh well, we should never confuse popularity with leadership. Silvio Berlusconi is still very popular among lots of Italians, too.

Poll: Obama Tops GOP on Unifying the Nation summarizes the poll's findings:
 

As President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress face-off over upcoming across-the-board spending cuts, Americans give sharply different marks on which of the two is working to unify the country or is simply pursuing partisan aims.

By a more than 2-to-1 margin, Americans say Mr. Obama is doing a better job overall than Republicans at attempting to unify the country in a bipartisan way, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

The poll found that 48% of respondents see Mr. Obama as trying to unify the country, compared to 22% who said that of Republicans and 37% who said that of Democrats.

By comparison, well over six in 10 Americans said Republicans are emphasizing a partisan approach that does not unify the country. Even among self-identified Republicans, 45% said their party was putting partisanship above trying to unite the country.

The share of those dinging the GOP for partisanship was still higher, at around 70%, among college graduates, moderates and people earning over $75,000.

That said, while Mr. Obama fared well on the partisan question, his party did only marginally better than the GOP. Nearly half of all Americans said Democrats emphasize a partisan approach."

Summing Up

Unifying the 'many' in the country behind the idea of asking the relatively 'few' so-called rich to pay a little more in taxes is a popular political ploy.

So is providing unfunded and unaffordable benefits to the  current oldsters without asking the current generation of taxpayers to pay for them.

Another popular approach is to refuse to recommend to the American people that we must make the hard decisions to bring federal spending and our nation's finances under control.

As long as We the People as taxpayers are content to borrow money in order to incur additional national debts of hundreds of billions of dollars each year for things like a perennial money losing U.S. Postal Service and a failing public education system, I guess we'll have a popular American in the White House. After all, he's trying hard to save the middle class.

But all that hard work is nothing compared to the approximately $100 trillion in unfunded benefits he'll leave to future Presidents and We the People to raise to pay for all the future commitments related to Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare and Social Security.

I guess it's just another example of the buy now, pay later, "Don't worry, be happy," put it on the tab, credit card, student debt, redistributionist, borrow it from the Chinese, all American way.

Politics sucks.

Thanks. Bob.

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