Obama, 'pent-up idealism,' reality check

by Mark Silva

What are we to make of President Barack Obama's apparent public job-approval heading into his 100th day in office?

It's nearly two-thirds in a few new widely respected surveys of public opinion - 63 to 65 percent of those surveyed say they approve of the president's performance. Gallup also has added a new twist to the picture, finding that 56 percent say Obama has done a good or excellent job, 23 percent saying "just okay,'' but that overall the president has met or exceeded expectations.

We asked a couple of seasoned Republican pollsters for their take on all this - how the president's approval ratings could stand so high at a time of such economic turmoil, and perhaps more importantly, how long this could last.

One, Lance Tarrance, suggests that Obama is "riding a crest of pent-up idealism.'' Tarrance suggests that Americans are "going to be very generous with Obama for some time.''

The proof, as the president likes to say, will be in the eating of the pudding - the ability of the president to tackle the greatest problem he faces today, the economy.

Pollster Ed Goaes suggests that once unemployment reaches double digits - something the Obama administration has warned of in the near future - the public may start taking a new accounting of the president's performance.

"It's going to be that magic number of 10 percent unemployment,'' Goaes says. "That's when I think you're going to see a lot of this stuff starting to come apart, assuming that it will.''

See the report in Tribune newspapers today on the state of the president's public approval as he approaches his 100th day in office (next week), and see more of what these two Republican pollsters had to say about all this in interviews with Tribune's Washington bureau, here in the Swamp:

"As a Republican, I look at the realities of it, and I believe Anmerica is going to be very generous with Obama for some time,'' pollster Tarrance says of Obama's apparent approval ratings. "Anything above 60 percent in this day and age is pretty good, so we have to give him that...

"I would say that, for a solid year, Obama is going to get a pretty good ride, certainly in the upper 50s to the lower 60s. Part of that is due to a Republican Party that really hasn't developed a consensus of its own yet.

"If Obama takes a pretty good hit in 2010, and he may... there is frustration that is inevitable, if things don't work,'' Tarrance says. "But it will take an attrition over at least two or three elections before Obama is shown to have not learned on the job.''

Pollster Goeas notes that the public polls, because they interview all adults, as opposed to carefully screening for actual voters, tend to be more generous. The polling that he has seen, going back to late March, put Obama's performance rating, on average, at 59 percent.

At the same time, Goeas notes, Obama has taken a new tack in his own rhetoric about the economy. For a long time, the president was "down-talking the economy.'' And since he has started taking a more optimistic view - speaking of those "glimmers of hope'' that he sees, he may have had a positive impact on the public's view of him. Nevertheless, Goeas suggests, reality at some point will catch up with Obama.

"I do think he had caught himself - he had been so down-talking the economy, he was making the situation worse by down-talking the economy,'' Goeas says. "I saw a sort of concentrated shift (a few weeks ago.)

"I've always felt that there will be kind of a cards-falling,'' the pollster says of the president's ultimate reality check. "It's going to be that magic number of 10 percent unemployment... That's when I think you're going to see a lot of this stuff starting to come apart, assuming that it will.''