Polls: Americans starting to hold Obama responsible for economy

NYT/CBS News poll finds that

fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.

WSJ/NBC News poll finds:

Nearly seven in 10 survey respondents said they had concerns about federal interventions into the economy, including Mr. Obama's decision to take an ownership stake in General Motors Corp., limits on executive compensation and the prospect of more government involvement in health care. The negative feeling toward the GM rescue was reflected elsewhere in the survey as well.

A solid majority -- 58% -- said that the president and Congress should focus on keeping the budget deficit down, even if takes longer for the economy to recover. [emphasis added]

Those numbers are pretty impressive.

Laura Zamora, 40, of Orange, Calif., voted for Mr. Obama but says she is frustrated by the economy and finds her support for the president waning. She says she's facing a possible layoff as a local government worker in California.

"He's bailing out the private sector. He's putting all kinds of money into the private sector," says Mrs. Zamora. "The money should be going to social programs, not to bailing out banks and GM. It should go to people who are unemployed."

That's interesting. Yesterday a Rush Limbaugh caller who voted for Obama said something very similar:

And to me he's done nothing. Nothing but help the higher-up people in the country [by corporate bailouts]. You know, what about the little people?

Rush almost choked on that and tried to educate Jeremy on how Obama was destroying rather than helping businesses. But the point is that people are feeling the pain of the worsening economy and holding Obama's policies responsible. They may not understand his antagonistic relationship with business or his destruction of the private sector but they know whether or not their own situation is improving or deteriorating. Perhaps some reality-mugging is taking place.

From the WSJ poll, people aren't buying Obama's "health care must be fixed to boost the economy" meme:

When asked what the most important economic issue facing the country is, 24% cited the deficit, vs. just 11% who named health care.

There was also support for the Democratic push to let people sign up for a public health-care plan that would compete with private companies, one of the toughest issues in the health-care debate. Three in four people said a public plan is extremely or quite important. But when told the arguments for and against the plan, a smaller portion, 47%, agreed with arguments in support of the plan, with 42% agreeing with the arguments against it.

At the same time, nearly half the participants said it was very or somewhat likely that their employer would drop private coverage if a public plan were available.

As for how to pay for the package, estimated at more than $1 trillion over 10 years, the public favors proposals to require all Americans to get insurance, to raise taxes on the rich and, to a lesser extent, to require all but the smallest businesses to offer insurance or pay into a fund.

Gak. From the NYT:

“My feeling is that Obama is just throwing money at things, but I don’t see anything being specifically targeted,” Lynn Adams, 62, a Republican from Troy, Mich., said in a follow-up interview. “But I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt because he hasn’t been in office long enough.”

That might be a reasonable approach if he weren't moving so %$@&# fast.

Love this:

As Mr. Obama finishes his fifth month in office and assumes greater ownership of the problems he inherited, Americans are alarmed by the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to boost the economy. A majority said the government should instead focus on reducing the federal deficit.

They make him sound downright magnanimous, don't they? He sure isn't assuming responsibility voluntarily; has he ever missed a chance to blame Bush?

CQ Politics agrees: Grace period over.

Linked by Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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