Obama Losing Viewers

A slow news cycle is death to bloggers and right now it’s slow. I heard that 51% of Ohioans would rather have Bush as President than Obama, but Bush has always been popular in the Rustbelt. California, Wisconsin and Washington are being called “battleground states” this election cycle, but Republicans always do well in those states. Some environmental whacko (inspired by Algore’s “Inconvenient Truther”) took some hostages, but there’s no obvious political motive. So what can we talk about? I know! How about this. . .

I’ve said before that you need to look at what people do, not what they say, to determine how they really feel. Right now, Obama’s poll numbers keep finding new lows. But that’s what people say, not what they do. In fact, it’s very easy to tell a pollster anything you want because there’s no level of commitment required at all. . . why yes, I would certainly buy a dog-food flavored toothpaste. ;-)

So how do we determine what people are really thinking? Well, we got a glimpse when Obama went to Martha’s Vineyard and we learned that Bush t-shirts were outselling Obama t-shirts. That tells us that there is an air of protest in the assembly, and it’s aimed at him -- this also dovetails with the Ohio poll. We can look at the fact that Democrats don’t want to be seen with him. That’s a pretty good indicator. We can look at the fact that Republicans are holding townhalls with little or no grief (even from the professional left, who always try to disrupt these things), but the Democrats won’t go near their constituents.

Old news huh?

Ok, we can look at the fact that the Democrats have gone from crowing about an easy victory in November to squealing about possibly losing the House to conceding the House as lost and now talking about losing the Senate -- and they're blaming Obama. We can look at CNN, which put up a list of the most vulnerable House incumbents, and only 14 of its top 100 are Republicans (and only 4 of those are in the top 50).

How about this: according to Nielsen, Obama’s prime time address on Iraq attracted only 29 million viewers. That’s about 9% of the population. I guess the other 91% had pressing engagements?

This number is also down 28% from his December 2009 Afghanistan speech. Taken as a measure of interest, that means he’s lost a quarter of the people he still attracted at Christmas, which was already down to 38 million from the 52 million who watched his acceptance of the Democratic nomination and his first inaugural address. All told, he’s lost close to 50% of his audience. . . kind of like how he went from 80% approval ratings to 40%.

And of those who did bother watching, FOX News outdrew MSNBC and CNN combined by 2.8 million to 2.3 million. In other words, his enemies were far more likely to watch the speech than his friends by a sizeable number. This speaks to the fact that the right is more engaged than the left, a fact born out by enthusiasm polls and significant differences in voter turnout in the primaries.

I also can’t help but notice that the media isn’t even trying to play up the Iraq story. Forget that Obama is lying about pulling out combat troops -- he’s simply renamed them -- this was still his biggest campaign promise; this was the one that vaulted him over Hillary Clinton and the loonsquad to become the Democratic nominee. You would think the media would play this up. But they aren’t. And the reason is simple, they don’t think the public cares (or believes him).

Falling viewership, slow merchandise sales, general lack of interest in the media and a creeping indifference in the fan base. . . sounds like this sitcom needs to be canceled?