Sarah Palin, BP oil leak take hits at President Obama's approval rating

Mike Lupica, NY Daily News

There was Sarah Palin yammering on about immigration, one more thing in her limited world view that is all Barack Obama's fault.

Sitting next to her was the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer. The picture of the two of them was more than somewhat frightening, like a political experiment gone horribly wrong.

Obama is moving up on 500 days in office now. Palin and the army of the right come at him harder than ever. Occasionally he leans back on the ropes and makes it easy, as he has with a response to the oil-rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that has been no response at all.

The President looks like one more finger-pointer on this, and less than stellar, having recently signed off on more offshore drilling himself.

It also appears that his administration looked the other way on what companies like British Petroleum are doing with rigs like Deepwater Horizon, though not nearly as much as Bush and Cheney did. For them, of course, oil-profiteering and deregulation were just things to do around starting wars.

So Deepwater Horizon blows and 11 die and a month goes by and now oil plumes are 10 miles long. BP still has no idea what to do about all that. The irony of all this is that at a time when Obama's big government is supposed to be a menace, those who hate this President so much now want big government to come riding over the hill and make the oil slick go away.

In so many ways, Louisiana is like the oil slick Obama inherited from his precedessor. Obama doesn't use that analogy. He is sticking with the car the Republicans drove into the ditch. In a speech the other night he said that now they want the keys back.

Yet his job approval rating is 50%, not so terrible for a man elected with 53% of the popular vote. It means that 16 months into this, half the people polled by NBC and the Wall Street Journal don't think he really is the menace that he is portrayed as being by the people who hate him as much as the other side hated George W. Bush at the end.

Of course, by that time, Bush's approval ratings had become something you found poking around in the garbage.

Tuesday, we begin to find out with a handful of primaries how a first wave of voters think this President - and his party - are doing. We find out if the mood in the country really is as hateful and toxic toward incumbents, and toward Democrats, as we are told every hour of every day by the oily, wild-eyed screamers of the right, for whom Obama has been the best possible opponent since Bill Clinton.

Palin runs hard with that crowd, without any actual beliefs of her own. Palin's idea of a big idea always has to be small enough to fit on a bumper sticker. So she is the political equivalent of an ambulance chaser, running to Arizona this weekend, sensing another opening with Obama.

This is about her and all the rest who come at Obama all the time, on everything he says or does, without any sense of proportion. Or irony. They don't believe everything they say, because they couldn't possibly. They just know Obama has been good for business, like Clinton was.

On Tuesday, we get the first small, random sampling of how much this populist anger is real and how far to the right candidates need to be, especially in a state like Kentucky, where Ron Paul's kid, Rand, a darling of Palin and the Tea Party bunch, is favored to succeed Jim Bunning, the old pitcher, in the Senate.

In Arizona in August, we will find out how far right John McCain has to go to beat a blowhard like J.D. Hayworth, who you would compare to Palin if only Hayworth were more rugged.

The other day Larry Forgy, a Republican in Kentucky, said, "This isn't an election, it's an uprising."

Glenn Beck was screaming at a gun rally over the weekend, telling people to fight "Marxists" at the polls. "Let's talk about a well-regulated militia and why you might need one," Beck yelled to fellow gun-lovers.

We will find between now and November how much of this over-the-top rhetoric, from Palin and the rest of them, is resonating with voters. Find out how much of the country has been convinced that Barack Obama is the oil slick now.



Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics...l#ixzz0oCEswfnL