Skip to content
51%
President Obama’s job approval rating. By comparison, just 22% approve of the job Republican leaders in Congress are doing, among the lowest approval rating for congressional leaders from either party in 20 years. A record-high 80% say Obama and Republican leaders are not working together to address important issues facing the country, and by nearly two-to-one (42%-22%) more blame Republican leaders than Obama for the gridlock.
33rd or 37th
Number of times the U.S. House of Representatives will have tried — unsuccessfully — to repeal the 2010 health-care reform law when it comes up for a vote next week, the Washington Post reports. Congressional aides can’t agree on the actual number of votes.
At nearly every speech I give, someone asks about President Obama’s failure to lead. Of course, that question has been driven largely by the media, perhaps most by Bob Woodward. When Woodward speaks, Washington listens, and he has pushed the idea that Obama has failed in his fundamental leadership task–not building relationships with key congressional leaders the way Bill Clinton did, and not ‘working his will’ the way LBJ or Ronald Reagan did. Now, after the failure to get the background-check bill through the Senate, other reporters and columnists have picked up on the same theme, and I have grown increasingly frustrated with how the mythology of leadership has been spread in recent weeks. I have yelled at the television set, ‘Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?’ But the issue goes beyond that, to a willful ignorance of history.
— Norm Ornstein, writing in National Journal.
17%
Percentage of the non-white vote Mitt Romney received in last year’s presidential election, Pew Research finds. “Non-whites were 26.3% of all voters in the 2012 election, a record high share. But they compose an even higher share of all U.S. adults age 18 and older — 33.9%. By 2020 this share will rise to 37.2%, and by 2060 it will be 54.8%, according to Census Bureau projections. If the racial voting patterns from the 2012 election persist, the electoral playing field for future Republican presidential candidates will become increasingly difficult.”
