Barack Obama is the second most reviled newbie president of the last forty years

It's official: Barack Obama is the second most reviled newbie president of the last forty years. A gallup survey today published in the Washington Times shows Obama to have an approval rating of just 56 per cent. The only president to have performed worse than that at the end of his first 100 days in office was Bill Clinton - and only then because it happened to coincide with the spectacular mishandling of the Waco siege, which might reasonably be laid at the door of ATF and FBI incompetence rather than presidential negligence.

Obama's low approval ratings, however, are all of his own making. He campaigned as a healing moderate who would take the US beyond partisan politics and restore the economy; instead he has terrified all those Americans who rightly abhor the idea of adopting European socialist, with the most sweeping advance of the progressive agenda and growth in the power of the state since the days of FDR's New Deal.

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