Is Obama In Trouble?

A Public Strategies Inc./Politico Poll finds that since March, "the number of Americans who say they trust the president has fallen from 66 percent to 54 percent. At the same time, the percentage of those who say they do not trust the president has jumped from 31 to 42." Over at CNN, columnist Gloria Borger writes about President Obama's "drooping recent poll numbers." He's also lost David Brooks. The president may head off to vacation on Martha's Vineyard without having passed a health-care overhaul, without having won congressional approval of his cap-and-trade climate-change and energy bill, without having gotten the labor unions their card-check bill, and without having gotten congressional action on immigration law changes. It's one thing for a president to be unpopular; it's another thing for an alternative to be more popular, which is why that Rasmussen Poll for 2012 showing Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney tied at 45% is getting some attention. Mr. Romney has plenty of critics on the right for the evolution of his views on abortion and for his health-care overhaul in Massachusetts, but concern about the future of the private sector economy is the sort of thing that might make a candidate with experience at Bain Capital attractive in comparison to one with experience as a community organizer. It'll be interesting to see whether the Paulson-Obama expansion of government involvement in the economy is a temporary deviation that is corrected by the 2010 or 2012 election or whether it is a more lasting shift more akin to the expansions of government in the FDR or Johnson-Nixon years. Right now it is too early to tell.