In the Bush years, poll results that showed the American people losing confidence in their president were featured routinely on the front page of major newspapers like The Washington Post. But when the Post discovers that President Obama's ratings are collapsing, you need a search party to find where inside the paper they're buried.
On April 26, the Post offered three stories on polls, each with bad news for Obama. The only one mentioned on the front page (in the very bottom right-hand corner) was a Post/ABC poll showing "rising gas prices are leading Americans to drive less, and hurting the president's popularity." From there, the reader would have to travel to page A-12.
"Hurting" is an understatement. Only 39 percent of those who called gas prices a "serious financial hardship" approve of Obama's performance as president. Among independents who found hardship, 67 percent disapprove of Obama. Ouch.
The Post said this hardship could "slow Obama's reelection campaign." Again, that's putting it mildly. Sixty percent of independents feeling the pain of gas prices said they would definitely not vote for Obama. In a match-up with Mitt Romney in that bracket, Romney wins by 24 points.
Turn the page backward, and on page A-10, there's another story. More Americans disapprove of Obama's management of the war in Afghanistan than support it: 44 percent approved, 49 percent disapproved. Once again, just focus on the independents: 53 percent disapproved of Obama's handling of Afghanistan.
Remember the daily barrage of George W. Bush (lack of) approval stories during the Iraq war? Where are those same "reporters" now? Turn the page backward one more time, and on page A-8, there's perhaps the most shocking poll story: Egyptians still disapprove of America. This poll came from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, created in 2002 by liberals at Pew to underline global dissatisfaction with Bush. Last spring, they announced with great fanfare -- this is their own press release headline -- "Obama More Popular Abroad than at Home, Global Image of U.S. Continues To Benefit."
Whoops. What they're finding now is that when Pew sampled Egyptians to see if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of the United States, just 20 percent of Egyptians have a favorable view of the United States, compared to 79 percent unfavorable.
How could this be, after our media hailed Obama's "historic" speech in Cairo in 2009, bowing deeply to what "the holy Koran tells us," telling how he loved as a child to hear "the call of the azan at the break of dawn," and playing up "civilization's debt to Islam"?