AT THIS HOUR, Real Clear Politics -- the only polling authority followed by Unca D -- has Mr. Obama's job approval at 40.6 percent. That's the first time since he took office that the president has dropped below 41 percent. [UPDATE: It's 40.4 percent at midday Wednesday.]
Exactly one year ago, days after he had won reelection with the help of a lawless IRS, fictional unemployment numbers, negative campaigning, and lies about Mr. Romney . . .
. . . Mr. Obama stood at 51 percent approval.
The president has dropped 10.4 points in one year, just short of a point a month.
Thanks to the miserable rollout of Obamacare and the shock -- shock, I say -- of discovering that Mr. Obama, a serial prevaricator, had lied ("If you like your insurance . . . .") to pass the miserable law, the decline has been even more precipitous recently -- 3.0 points in the last month and 4.2 percent in the last three months.
Mr. Obama proved that it is indeed true that a person can fool all of the people some of the time. But his time appears to be up.
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Don't send an email with all the methodological problems with Real Clear Politics's poll of the polls, primarily that it averages polls made with different populations -- all adults, registered voters, and likely voters.
I know that. I don't care.
That defect is offset, in my view, by the virtues of poll aggregation.
One is the larger aggregate polling population from averaging multiple polls.
The other is that averaging dampens the volatility exhibited by most individual polls. They rattle around inside the famous margin of error like a pinball in an arcade machine.
Now and then -- this is definitional, folks -- they even land outside the margin of error.
For these reasons, trusting a single poll -- no matter how reputable -- means exposing yourself to false narratives. The president is up! Now he's down! Now he's sideways. All the while, nothing may have happened.
RCP is like an ocean tanker. It changes directions slowly, but when it does, get out of the way.
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