July 21, 2010 04:00 PM UTC

Quinnipiac shows Gallup jump for Dems to be outlier.

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• by: Laughing Boy

(Finally! – promoted by ClubTwitty)

Not just more bad news for the Dems in Congress, but Obama has fallen to his lowest approval rating ever. [Emphasis mine]

Anti-incumbent sentiment slams both parties as voters disapprove 59 – 31 percent of the job Democrats are doing, and disapprove 59 – 29 percent of Republicans in Congress. But voters say 43 – 38 percent they would vote for a Republican in a generic Congressional race.

And that’s some of the best news for Obama in the poll….but it might be great news for him, and bad news for the country in the end.

More Quinnipiac:

A year after President Barack Obama’s political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 – 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 – 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

And the best …ahem… worst part of all:

“It was a year ago, during the summer of 2009 that America’s love affair with President Barack Obama began to wane. In July of 2009, the President had a 57 – 33 percent approval rating. Today, his support among Democrats remains strong, but the disillusionment among independent voters, who dropped from 52 – 37 percent approval to 52 – 38 percent disapproval in the last 12 months, is what leads to his weakness overall when voters start thinking about 2012,” said Peter A. Brown., assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

“In politics a month is a lifetime and we have 28 months until November of 2012. But politicians with re-elect numbers at 40 percent bear watching,” Brown added.

Now, that said, Charles Krauthammer had a thoroughly depressing and terrifying, but IMO accurate representation of why these numbers might not be bad for Obama at this point.

That’s why there’s so much tension between Obama and the congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will likely have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as his foil for his 1996 re-election campaign.

Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days – those that come after re-election.

2012 is the real prize. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans. Republicans underestimate him at their peril.

Here’s the terrifying part…

But Obama’s most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed.

These are not mere temporary countercyclical measures. They are structural deficits because, as everyone from Obama on down admits, the real money is in entitlements, most specifically Medicare and Medicaid. But Obama- care freezes these out as a source of debt reduction. Obamacare’s $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax increases are siphoned away for a new entitlement – and no longer available for deficit reduction.

The result? There just isn’t enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases – most likely a European- style value-added tax. Just as President Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama’s wild spending will necessitate huge tax increases.

The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo – the list is long. The critics don’t understand the big picture. Obama’s transformational agenda is a play in two acts.

We’ve now spent so much money on entitlements that we really have no way out, and that’s why it was such a brilliant move on Obama’s part. He passed a worthless stimulus and a health care bill that basically does nothing for many years (and then simply makes health care more expensive for those who pay for it currently and will intentionally lead to the end of private insurers), so that now Republicans look like bad guys for arguing over unemployment extensions simply because they don’t want to borrow money to pay for it, but at this point, there is no other option.

Unfortunately, what has been done is economically unsustainable.  We are already well on our way to becoming a big version of California.  We have eliminated our budgetary margin of error with entitlements – not even massive tax increases will get us back to where we need to be, but you can be sure they’re coming.

So…

Was it worth it to have committed what looks to be economic suicide in order to redistribute wealth and invoke some of these massive government takeovers of so much of the economy and huge new entitlements, and why?