Obama at 37%.

As pictured by Drudge:



Bush's final approval rating in the CBS poll was 22%, but he didn't sink as far as 37% until 2006, 2 years after reelection. [ADDED: According to what's shown now here, Bush was at 37% in November 2005, which corresponds exactly to Obama. I was looking at a less detailed graph.] Bush's real sinking in the polls occurred with Katrina, which the media exploited to damage Bush.

By contrast, the media have generally boosted Obama, especially last year, facilitating his reelection. They minimized the various scandals, and they declined to delve into the looming problems in Obamacare.

Now we see crashing in Obama polls, and part of this is the media's fault. 1. They lulled people into thinking Obama was doing well enough, which continued his presidency, based on a false picture. 2. When the true picture could no longer be obscured, it was so glaring and obvious, and it got everyone's attention. 3. So many people were liking Obama because liking Obama was a cultural phenomenon, which inflated Obama's popularity and left it vulnerable to crashing when, at long last, there's a cultural message that it's the thing now not to like him anymore. 4. Plenty of people probably never liked him all that much, and they're just liberated from the social pressure to follow the latest thing, which is now so 5 years ago.

Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, and Chris Matthews daintily allude to Obama's masculinity deficit.

On yesterday's "Meet the Press," Tom Brokaw said it was "just inexplicable" that the Obamacare website "suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos." The President should have pressured "Kathy Sebelius and other people" about the "rollout" which was "going to be our big play for the second term."

"Big play" picks up on that football metaphor Obama used 4 times in his November 14th remarks. "We fumbled," he said, though in real football, it's an individual player who fumbles. But here was this "big play," and somebody fumbled. Was it "Kathy"?

The moderator David Gregory, immediately steps up to frame the next question in macho terms: "Who's got the muscle?" The manly (though 50-years-dead) JFK somehow shoulders his way into the conversation. Gregory turns to Chris Matthews and says:

You were making the point to me this week about, you know, where's his Bobby Kennedy? Who's got the muscle? When the president says, and he did say, "The user experience of this website is everything," who had the muscle in the White House to get it done and make sure the president gets what he wants?

Muscle, muscle, muscle. If a right-winger had phrased the question that way, somebody would call this misogyny. These 3 men — Brokaw, Gregory, and Matthews — are hankering for a muscular man who can nail the big play. He depended on a Kathy when he needed a Bobby. And here's what Chrissy Matthews said:

Everybody goes to their battle stations when there's chaos. 

I'll see you your football metaphor, and raise you a military metaphor.

You always go to where you've been arguing before. But I've always been arguing this president doesn't have a chain of command, a very clear line of authority and unique responsibility. I remember Sebelius, who I like of course, most people do like her, she's a public servant. 

She's liked. Kathy's likeable enough. She's a good servant.

But when she was asked, "Who's in charge?" in that committee, under oath, she started to talk about someone, the head of C.M.S., who handles Medicare and Medicaid. Among 30 or 40 other responsibilities, this person had the rollout responsibilities.

And was "this person" male or female? Female. Marilyn Tavenner. Can you say her name without vaulting back in time to your old macho icons Jack and Bobby? They knew what "responsibilities" to give their Marilyn.

Matthews reaches even further back, to an even manlier man:

Look at Japan, the occupation of Japan, it simple: Put one guy in charge, Doug MacArthur. 

Put one guy in charge. Doug. Call him Doug, not Douglas. Not — in the style of "Kathy" — Dougy. He's Doug. And there was a guy! Put one guy in charge.

You put somebody in charge and they're uniquely responsible for its success or failure. Obama doesn't do things that way. He's got floaters, like Valerie Jarett, floating around. 

Floaters. Like Valerie Jarrett. The disrespect! They can't even spell her name right in the transcript. Floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around. Matthews being a good Democrat somehow feels secure that the double meaning of "floaters" won't bring on the accusations of racism that would surely have burst forth if a Republican had talked about Jarrett like that.

He doesn't want to have a real chief of staff, like a Jim Baker.

He's saying — it's hardly subtle — that Jarrett's not a real man. You need a man. A man like Bobby or Doug or Jim.

He doesn't want to give authority to people, and I think it's been a real problem.

So what does this say about Obama, not wanting to bring in real men, who take charge, who make the play, who exert authority? He's not man enough to work alongside real men? He needs to play with the ladies, ladies who don't know their place — who dither and float?

"He came in with his right hand raised and basically kept it raised the entire semester," said Alan Dershowitz about Ted Cruz.

"Every year you see two or three [Harvard Law] students who you know are natural leaders. Everybody saw that with Barack Obama . . . Everybody saw that with Elena Kagan. There are students who come in with charismatic qualities who other people follow. He was one of them."

But how much easier to be the leader at Harvard when you are voicing liberal opinions!

He... enjoyed antagonizing liberal classmates. Late nights at the Law Review were the scene of fierce debates....

“Some topic would come up and it was a free for all,” said Dean Newton, a fellow conservative on the Law Review. “All you’d have to do is say something remotely conservative and it would catch people’s hair on fire. It was fun to goad them.”

Do you have to be the sort of person who finds it "fun" to make your peers mad to emerge as a leader when you are conservative? I'm sure others had some conservative urges but kept silence because they cared about being liked.

I suspect that this is part of a deep structural problem in conservatism today — why the GOP ends up with so many characters who rub women (and sensitive men) the wrong way.

A quote from Cruz:

“There is a depressing tendency in modern political life to disparage those who disagree with you as either stupid or evil.... They’re either too dumb to know the right answer or, even worse, they’re smart enough and yet they wish suffering on others and are just downright evil.’ The truth of the matter, most people are neither.”

What if you bitched on Facebook about the raw deal you got under Obamacare and nobody "liked" you?

Shocked at the new and worse deal she was offered under Obamacare, Lori Gottlieb wrote an item titled "Obamacare or Kafkacare?” on Facebook. Facebook is a website that — unlike healthcare.gov — works, so she expected lots of "likes." She liked her old insurance, and Obama said if you like it, you can keep it.

Like, like, like!

Everything is, like, about liking these days, and Lori must have thought she was likeable enough, but nobody liked her.

Instead, aside from my friend David, who attempted to cheer me up with, “My dad, who never turns down a bargain, would take the sex change just because it’s free,” my respondents implied — in posts that, to my annoyance, kept getting more “likes” — that it was beyond uncool to be whining about myself when the less fortunate would finally have insurance.

“The nation has been better off,” wrote one friend. “Over 33 million people who did not have insurance are now going to get it.” That’s all fine and good for “the nation,” but what about my $5,400 rate hike (after-tax dollars, I wanted to add, but dared not in this group of previously closeted Mother Teresas)? Another friend wrote, “Yes, I’m paying an extra 200 a month, but I’m okay with doing that so that others who need it can have health care.”

I was shocked. Who knew my friends were such humanitarians? Has Obamacare made it un-P.C. to be concerned by a serious burden on my family’s well-being?

Gottlieb got seriously burned, but had she really never noticed this form of liberal disciplining before? It's funny to act surprised that these people are suddenly "such humanitarians," but she's experiencing heightened awareness because $5,400 is so specific and real, and she, in her personal anger, made the mistake of thinking her "friends" (Facebook friends) were people of empathy toward individual others. But sober observation should have taught her that left-liberals expect individual self-sacrifice for the good of the group.

It will be interesting to see how that website that works, Facebook, will process the stories of individuals burned by Obamacare. Ironically, Gottlieb is nudging Facebookers not to complain if they find themselves losers. Hers is a cautionary tale: You will not be liked. But perhaps enough stories will break through the fear of not being likeable, and a tipping point will be reached. There could be a cascade of liking not liking Obamacare.

"If you believe the healthy are entitled to keep the financial benefits of their good health, then you must also believe the sick must be denied medical care."

Writes Jonathan Chait in a New York Magazine piece titled "Why Letting Everyone Keep Their Health-Care Plan Is a Terrible Idea."

Chait concedes that Obama et al. lied when they promised that people could keep their plans if they like them, but wants us to look separately at whether those who had and wanted to keep their low-cost, low-coverage plans should feel that's it's unfair not to be able to have plans like that. Can you separate these 2 things? I have 2 problems with separating these 2 things.

1. If, at the time, Obama et al. had said "If you have a low-cost, low-coverage plan, you'll be forced to buy a much more expensive plan," then the political dynamic would have been different, and Obamacare would almost surely not have passed. A political argument premised on the unfairness of having a plan like that was never attempted, so that's one sign that the unfairness argument isn't too persuasive.

2. Even now, some Obamacare proponents seem to be suggesting that the words "if you like your plan, you can keep it" ought to be interpreted in a deviously subtle way where liking your plan doesn't depend on what individuals with plans consciously feel that they like. The government's sophisticated assessment of what you should want is a truer of test of what you, at a deep level, like. Voila! Lie erased! No means yes!

But I'll nevertheless play Chait's game. Let's just look at whether it's fair for someone to want to buy low-cost insurance that doesn't cover a lot of day-to-day ordinary expenses and that has a high deductible. This person, who Chait thinks is asking for too much, is betting on his continued good health, willing to pay out-of-pocket for routine health things (just as he pays out-of-pocket for food, shelter, and clothing), and uses insurance as a backup in case something big happens. He only wants "catastrophic" coverage.

Now, go back to that quote I used for the post title, and you should see that it doesn't fit: "If you believe the healthy are entitled to keep the financial benefits of their good health, then you must also believe the sick must be denied medical care." Our low-cost insurance-buyer wasn't free-loading! He was making a rational decision that did not unfairly rely on society's unwillingness to deny medical care to the sick. He opted not to pool his money with others for the day-to-day expenses that he incurs before anything big happens. What he declined to do was subsidize other people's routine health care. And he had insurance to cover him if something really expensive comes up.

Isn't it bad enough that this person was egregiously lied to?! You have to also brand him as a taker?!