Obama’s ‘Katrina moment’ leaves his favorability factor at 42 percent

For all the talk about a possible “Katrina moment” for President Obama for his failure to visit the southern border and witness firsthand the crisis of illegal minor-age immigrant border crossers, his numbers are holding steady.

But that could be because they were already so low, CNN reported.

A just-released CNN/ORC International poll shows that only 42 percent believe Mr. Obama is an effective manager of the federal government. That’s virtually unchanged from March, when 43 percent felt that way. So what happened to the predictions of a ratings fall from Mr. Obama’s outright denial to visit the border and instead, continue with fundraising plans in Texas?

“When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, the biggest impact on attitudes toward George W. Bush came in the number who said that he could manage the government effectively. That number dropped 10 points and no other personal quality measured at that time changed as much,” said CNN polling director Keating Howard. “Using that as a definition of a ’Katrina moment,’ it looks like Obama has not experienced a similar drop in the summer of 20145, in part because his numbers already took that hit last year and have stabilized since then.”

Still, 42 percent is nothing to crow about.

“Those numbers are not good news for the White House,” Mr. Keating went on, CNN reported. “But the clear indication is that the president’s problems pre-date the current immigration crisis along the Mexican border or anything else that has happened this summer, and that those problems have not made things significantly worse for the president.”

Mr. Obama’s numbers actually started dropping after the Edward Snowden revelations of U.S. spy activities on innocent Americans, and after citizens learned of the IRS targeted of conservative political groups. Obamacare website rollout failures also hit the administration hard in terms of favorability — and that’s when the majority of the public disapproved of his presidency, for the first time since 2009.

The poll of 1,012 adult Americans was conducted between July 18 and 20, and has a sampling margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.