Note: With the president in Italy for the G8 summit meetings, it falls to his vice president to try to staunch the fall in public opinion. And with more and more Americans questioning the effectiveness of the massive government bailout, a new Quinnipiac Poll shows that Obama's approval rating has dropped 13 points in the last two months in Ohio, a bellwether state for presidential elections for more than a century. The plunge: from 62% approval in May to 49% now.
"The economy in Ohio is as bad as anywhere in America," said Peter Brown, who runs the Quinnipiac Poll. "These numbers indicate that for the first time, voters have decided that President Barack Obama bears some responsibility for their problems."
Gosh, I guess the people of Ohio are tired of being lied to by Dems like T-Shirt Ted Strickland,Charade Brown, Steve Driehaus, and others who have told them they would fix the economy, but have only ushered in further destruction to an economy that just a decade ago was doing well.
From the LA Times:
Vice President Biden traveled to Ohio today, trying to salvage public support for President Obama's $787-billion stimulus package.
With the president in Italy for the G8 summit meetings, it falls to his vice president to try to staunch the fall in public opinion. And with more and more Americans questioning the effectiveness of the massive government bailout, a new Quinnipiac Poll shows that Obama's approval rating has dropped 13 points in the last two months in Ohio, a bellwether state for presidential elections for more than a century. The plunge: from 62% approval in May to 49% now.
"The economy in Ohio is as bad as anywhere in America," said Peter Brown, who runs the Quinnipiac Poll. "These numbers indicate that for the first time, voters have decided that President Barack Obama bears some responsibility for their problems."
Adding to the administration's woes is news that state legislatures are -- imagine! -- playing politics with decisions on where to spend the stimulus dollars. Tracing the first monies dispersed by the administration, the New York Times, in an examination of the 5,274 transportation projects approved so far, found that "the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money" from transportation stimulus funds. Since large cities have major congestion and transportation issues, on its face this seems silly.
In Ohio, for instance, the Times found that Cleveland was initially promised $200 million to help build a five-lane bridge to replace the 50-year-old Innerbelt Bridge, so deteriorated that officials last fall banned heavy truck traffic. But then state officials, worried about meeting federal deadlines, decided to spend $115 million of that money on "shovel-ready projects." So, at the moment, the largest stimulus project in Ohio is bolstering the Nelsonville Bypass in southeastern Ohio to improve transportation to Appalachia.
Transportation to Appalachia? Not exactly a good way to alleviate traffic congestion in the cities. One expert called it the typical "peanut-butter" approach by state legislators eager to be reelected.
“If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,” said Brookings Institution's Robert Puentes told the Times. “But states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.”
Maybe Biden will explain all this soon. In the meantime, USA Today, looking at the first "easily traceable" $17 billion, found that counties that supported Obama during the 2008 election received twice as much money as those that went for his rival John McCain. This seems on its face contradictory to the Times' finding probably something about apples and oranges.
What is clear is that folks are unhappy with the pace of the recovery, worried that the debt-producing program will only add to the nation's economic woes.
What else is clear is that this is administration is nothing more than a thugocracy, where only those who pledge blind allegiance to the
