Thursday night, Fred Barnes coined a fitting new phrase to describe President Obama’s problem when he talked about President Obama’s persuasion gap problem. Fred said that President Obama is great at selling himself but he isn’t good at selling his policies. I agree. More importantly, others are noticing. Check out this article:

WASHINGTON — After a fairly smooth opening, President Barack Obama faces new concerns among the American public about the budget deficit and government intervention in the economy as he works to enact ambitious health and energy legislation, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds. These rising doubts threaten to overshadow the president’s personal popularity and his agenda, in what may be a new phase of the Obama presidency.

“The public is really moving from evaluating him as a charismatic and charming leader to his specific handling of the challenges facing the country,” says Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster who conducts the survey with Republican Bill McInturff. Going forward, he says, Mr. Obama and his allies “are going to have to navigate in pretty choppy waters.”

Ed’s citing of Michael Barone’s article tells the same story:

• 69% say they have a great deal or quite a bit of concern about government ownership of General Motors and a 56%-35% majority opposes government aid to General Motors in return for a share of its stock.
• 58% say the president and Congress should concentrate on keeping the budget deficit down, even if it takes longer for the economy to recover.
• By a 52%-41% margin they prefer reducing the budget deficit to stimulating the economy.
• Only 30% think Obama has developed a clear plan for dealing with the budget deficit, while 60% believe he hasn’t.

The trend is so noticeable that even Dan Balz is noticing:

Polls show concern about the size of government and the mushrooming deficits under Obama’s policies. For some time, the polls also have shown public skepticism about the president’s efforts to use federal money to save General Motors. Obama’s effort to include a public health insurance plan as part of the overall health care reform package has become a flash point in that debate.

Those findings represent flashing yellow lights for the administration, which is why the president has moved, symbolically and rhetorically at least, to counter any suggestions that he is a big-government Democrat. His rhetoric has consistently emphasized his commitment to restoring fiscal discipline as quickly as possible. But his efforts have been minimal in comparison to what he’s done to grow government, and there is little he can do in the short run.

President Obama can talk until he’s blue in the face about restoring fiscal discipline but people won’t buy his happy talk until he does something to actually restore fiscal sanity. Nothing that President Obama has done indicates that he’s even willing to consider anything that doesn’t consist of dramatically bigger government.

In fact, there’s a good possibility that President Obama is hurting himself by constantly talking about PAYGo, fiscal responsibility, etc., then doing nothing. People will eventually conclude that he isn’t serious about fixing the overspending problem that he’s responsible for. In short, he’s being seen more and more as a hypocrite whose policies are putting future generations at risk.

Prior to his inauguration, I said that President Obama’s biggest problem would be that he’d now be measured by the success of his solutions, not his speechmaking ability. That truth is slowly catching up with him. People like him on a personal level but they aren’t reluctant to tell pollsters that they disagree with his policies.

The Obama administration’s economic team has been a laughingstock thus far, starting with Tim Geithner’s disastrous briefing of Wall Street executives on the specifics of TARP. (As I recall, the market dropped almost 450 points that day, almost solely on Wall Street’s disgust with Geithner’s unprofessionalism. Instead of giving them a detailed briefing on TARP II, Geithner gave them a brief outline sketch of TARP going forward.)

The stimulus bill is another thing that’s giving the Obama administration headaches. President Obama invested alot of political capital on the bill, telling the nation that we were headed for a catastrophe if it didn’t pass. It’s passed and the Obama administration’s worst case unemployment scenarios have come true and then some.

This administration’s job creation projections are ignored or laughed at because they’ve been so badly wrong.

That’s before talking about foreign policy and national security. This week, President Obama said that the United States shouldn’t meddle in Iran’s affairs even though there’s a revolutionary uprising against the reigning mullahs’ oppressive tactics.

At the same time, President Obama hasn’t hesitated in jawboning Israel for defending itself against Hamas’s rocket attacks into Israel.

Polling shows President Obama losing ground on the foundations of his policies:

First, the people have little confidence in government as an effective instrument of public purpose. Trust in government remains near an historic low and has not improved significantly since the beginning of Obama’s presidency. Only 34 percent think that government should do more to solve national problems, down seven points in the past three months. Sixty-nine percent express “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of concern about the expanding role of the federal government in areas such as automobile companies, corporate compensation, and health care.

Second, people are unsure about Obama’s overall economic strategy. Only 46 percent say that they are “extremely” or “quite” confident that the president has the right set of goals and policies to improve the economy; 53 percent are not. According to Pew, approval of the president’s handling of the economy has declined by eight points (from 60 to 52 percent) since mid-April.

Third, evidence is accumulating that the administration misjudged the public’s reaction to increased spending and rising budget deficits, which now rank second in the list of top concerns in the NYT/CBS poll, behind only job creation and economic growth, and ahead of health care costs as an economic issue. Indeed, Pew finds that concern over spending and deficits is now the most frequently cited reservation about the administration’s economic policies. Only 30 percent think the administration has developed a clear plan for dealing with the deficit; 60 percent do not.

Fourth, while there is majority support for the broad architecture of health reform that the administration espouses, doubts about specifics are multiplying. The people are evenly divided on whether the president’s plan should focus more on costs (41 percent) or on coverage (43 percent). But only 18 percent think that his plan in fact gives priority to controlling costs, versus 64 percent who believe it is mostly about expanding coverage. And while majorities favor imposing “play or pay” requirements on businesses and raising taxes on Americans with incomes over $250,000 to pay for health reform, only 33 percent favor taxing people with “expensive health plans,” and 70 percent say that a broader tax on employer-provided health plan is “not acceptable.” The Pew survey also suggests that, relative to 1993, there is less support for radical change in the system, more support for cost containment as the top priority, and a decline in support for universal health insurance among both Republicans and independents. In light of these doubts, it is not surprising to discover that while 44 percent approve of the president’s handling of health care, 34 disapprove, while 22 percent remain unsure.

While President Obama’s speeches are often pitch perfect, his policies frequently are greeted with skepticism and outright disdain. That’s because there’s little proof that President Obama has thought his policies through.

It won’t be long before Republican advertisements start asking the question whether people are better off now than when the Obama administration started. Once that question starts getting discussed, the Obama administration, and congressional Democrats, will have a new set of headaches.

That’s what happens when people vote the wrong way based solely on ideology rather than on what’s best for the American people.

Technorati: Polling, President Obama, Personal Poularity, Policies, Economy, Recession, Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, Health Care, Spending, Deficits, Democrats

Cross-posted at California Conservative