People Liking Obama Better

A Gallup poll conducted within the past week shows some interesting results. It's one of these "do you approve of how Obama's handling Issue X?" polls, and the last time it was conducted was August. Back then, Obama had positive marks on just one of eight issues, coming in at +13 on "terrorism." He was worse than -30 net on "creating jobs," "handling the federal budget deficit," and "handling the economy," with -47 on the deficit the worst. All in all he had an average ranking of -21% on these eight issues. Three months later, and he's got a positive rating on "terrorism," "foreign affairs," "the situation in Afghanistan," and "the situation in Iraq." That's all the foreign-policy stuff; terrorism is still his strong suit (seriously), at a whopping +32 now. His low is still the deficit (an issue designed for disapproving of people over), where he's still mired at -41. But in the last three months he's gained eight net points on the economy, fourteen on foreign affairs, six on the deficit, twenty-one on Afghanistan, two on health-care policy (as to which nothing's happened), nineteen on terrorism, twelve on creating jobs, and twenty-three on Iraq. Currently his average rating is -8%, not good but a lot better than -21%. Excluding health-care, he saw an average increase of nearly 15% per issue.

I've seen a lot of these "approval on the issues" polls, and I've essentially never seen a shift this dramatic. Since August people have started to like Barack Obama a lot better, just about across the board. They don't like his handling of the economy, because the economy sucks, but the economy hasn't really gotten much better in that span and people are nonetheless liking Obama's handling thereof significantly better. Meanwhile foreign policy, which (remember, people?) was the original raison d'etre for the Obama candidacy, has re-emerged as his comparative strength. Moreover, he's actually strong there now: people like his foreign-policy, according to this poll, by an average margin of 13%. The past few months have seen Obama get a lot more confrontational with the Republicans, calling them out on a variety of issues. That should make people like the Republicans a lot less, and I think it has. But it looks like, combined with some genuine good developments in foreign policy, the new, confrontational Obama is making people like Obama more. Keep it up.