Gallup started keeping track of the president's overall job approval in the 1940s, starting with Harry Truman. More times than not, this approval
rating has meant everything to the president and he will often work to do things to move his approval up, in the hopes of being reelected.
A lot has been made about President Obama's high approval numbers compared to President Bush's low numbers when he left office.
I don't know when it was released, but USA Today has released a handy
dandy flash graph thing with which you can view each president's, since tracking began, approval rating and compare them and see where each
president was/is at at the same point in time.
The thing that I found interesting is that, for all the hoopla around Obama's "high" numbers, he is only doing better than Gerald Ford and Bill
Clinton at this day in his presidency. That means that even George W. Bush was doing better at this stage in the game, when you would think that he
would've been doing worse considering all the disgruntled people still saulking over the Supreme Court "handing" Bush the victory over Al Gore.
Granted, Bush is only doing better (as far as approval goes) at this point by about one percentage point or two. But, Obama has more people that
disapprove of his presidency according to these numbers than Bush did. Obama has around 41% disapproval compared to Bush's 33%. The "no opinion"
is 4% to 11% for Obama and Bush respectively.
If anything, I think that these numbers show how the main stream media are trying to manipulate our opinion of Obama to make us think that he is doing
better than any president before him.
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