Rasmussen Poll Reveals Obamanomics Falling Out of Favor with Americans

With Iran and North Korea absorbing much of the national media’s attention recently, public dissatisfaction with President Obama’s must-have-or-else $787-billion stimulus plan has gone relatively unnoticed.

An unheralded recently released Rasmussen poll [1] highlighted some of the doubts surrounding Obama’s economic policies, as pointed out by Wall Street Journal editorial board member and senior economics writer Stephen Moore and Fox News Channel host Greta Van Sustren, on the June 22 “On the Record.” One of the poll’s findings: it’s time for Obama to take ownership of the economy in the wake of his unprecedented policy maneuvers and stop blaming his predecessor.

“I think this is the problem, Greta, for the president is he wants to be able to for the next four years, if things go poorly, blame George Bush,” Moore said. “After all, don’t forget, when Franklin Roosevelt was president, the economy didn’t get better, he just would blame the economy on Herbert Hoover and said you do not want to go back to the Hoover days. Now, what was interesting about those poll results that you just showed was a lot Americans are now saying now it is the Obama economy now. It is not the George Bush economy. It’s going to make it much more difficult for the White House to say, ‘Well, you know what? This is a problem that we inherited from George Bush.’”

The poll also pointed out public disillusionment with the massive stimulus passed earlier this year, and suggested it is time to cancel it altogether.

“Here is another number – President Obama announced recently that he wanted to speed up the pace of the stimulus spending,” Van Sustren said. “We heard that 41 percent said the rest of new government spending authorized in that $787 billion should now be cancelled. That’s a huge number.”

The biggest change has come from independents, according to Moore’s analysis of the poll. He explained Obama is falling out of favor with this coveted and played-up demographic that the media have insisted conservative members of the Republican Party are snubbing.

“And what we are seeing in these polling results, because I looked at the cross tabs on these numbers – you are seeing liberals very much in favor of what the president wants to do, conservatives very much opposed to him,” Moore said. “And then you have got that swing independent voters, which overwhelmingly went for Obama in November, and they are starting to really question the wisdom of a lot of these economic policies.”

Instead, people are beginning to look to a tried-and-true policy that was downplayed by the current administration.

“Fifty-one percent favor across-the-board tax cuts for all Americans to stimulate the economy,” Van Sustren added. “It doesn’t even say to the rich, it says 51 percent favor across the board for everyone. That seems like a big number.”

That has been a missing component from the administration’s economic policies, Moore explained.

“Remember when we did the stimulus plan, there were no across-the-board cuts,” Moore said. “There are no cuts for small businesses. I think that was one of the deficiencies.”