OPINION:
President Obama’s political barometer moved from bad to worse this week after his ill-conceived, illegal executive action to rewrite our immigration laws.
With a Gallup poll showing 54 percent of Americans disapproving of the way Mr. Obama is handling his job, as he clung to a dismal approval rating in the low 40s, the bottom fell out of his presidency Monday.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was abruptly forced out of his job — “fired,” said a senior White House official — as evidence mounted that the administration’s clumsy military actions in Iraq and Syria have failed to stem the growing terrorist threat from the Islamic State.
Insiders said Mr. Obama’s action was an attempt to shore up his weakened presidential image with a shake-up of his Cabinet after his party’s humiliating losses in the midterm elections.
The events of recent weeks, though, show that any changes in his Cabinet at this stage of his presidency would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
This is the third defense secretary to leave the Obama administration. The first two men, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, wrote scathing, tell-all books in their wake, taking the president to task for his thoughtless military withdrawal policies and his failure to make timely policy decisions to combat the resurgent terrorist offensive throughout the Middle East.
Mr. Hagel’s sudden removal in the midst of a major war on terrorism is the latest blundering example of an inexperienced president who has shown poor judgment in his policies and personnel.
With the next Congress firmly in Republican hands — effectively paralyzing Mr. Obama’s presidency over his final two years in office — polling data reveal that Americans are turning even more strongly against his agenda.
Days before his immigration actions, polls showed nearly 50 percent of Americans disapproved of his plan to make changes in the laws that they saw as the sole purview of Congress. Only 38 percent said they approved of the president’s unilateral actions, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
Even Hispanics deserted Mr. Obama. Just 43 percent said they approved of his acting alone, while a hefty 37 percent of them opposed his actions.
Perhaps the most stunning rebuke of Mr. Obama’s agenda was revealed last week in a Gallup poll about his signature health care reforms.
“For the third consecutive year, a majority of Americans (52 percent) agree with the position that it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage,” Gallup reported Thursday.
This is a sharp turnaround in Americans’ thinking about this issue since Mr. Obama was elected in 2008. When Gallup first polled this question in 2000, 59 percent said it was the government’s responsibility to see that all Americans had health care coverage.
The turnaround on this issue is the result of the heavy, dictatorial hand of government mandating countless rules, regulations, fines and punitive taxes on businesses and individuals that have led to higher insurance costs, killed jobs and weakened the national economy.
Millions of Americans lost their health care policies in the process because they did not meet Mr. Obama’s mandated-benefit standards. An untold number of employees lost jobs as businesses hired more part-timers to avoid Obamacare’s insurance mandates.
Jonathan Gruber, one of the Obama administration’s key advisers in the development of the law, has said Democrats hid many its most harmful details from the public to ensure its enactment.
Meantime, little by little, the Obama economy is coming under increasing criticism from some sectors of the news media, after nearly six years of defending weak economic data and turning a deaf ear to the worst statistics.
According to an analysis by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the decline in incomes has hurt millions of workers, but especially young adults who were forced to work part time when they couldn’t find full-time employment and were paid less. In a nutshell, their wage disparity was broader than we imagined.
Since 2009, when the recession deepened, median weekly wages for full-time men have declined by 3.5 percent when adjusted for inflation.
Nearly 7 million Americans who are looking for full-time jobs have been forced to take part-time work. They fell further beneath the wage disparity line as employers cut wages of new hires.
Full-time workers ages 16 to 19 earn 7.9 percent less than they made in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those who are 20 to 24 earn 6.1 percent less.
The news media ballyhoo the 5.8 percent jobless rate but do not say that many of these are part-time jobs in the lower-paying retail and food sectors. Nor do they tell you that since 2006, the number of workers needing full-time work but taking these part-time jobs has increased 65 percent.
“Wages haven’t risen hand-in-hand with employment because the labor market isn’t back to full health,” Chico Harlan writes in The Washington Post.
So many Americans are still looking for work in the underperforming Obama economy — and not enough jobs are available for them — “that employers have little incentive to boost wages,” he said.
Mr. Obama seems resolutely opposed to doing anything that would create jobs. The Republican-led House voted to complete the Keystone XL pipeline, and 31 Democrats joined in approving it. The proposed project failed by one vote in the Senate, where every Republican supported it.
The bill will sail through Congress when Republicans take full control of both houses in January, but Mr. Obama plans to veto it, even though it would create thousands of needed jobs.
• Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.