-- President Obama’s job-approval rating in West Virginia according to the most recent survey by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.
Democrats increasingly lament that the current president isn’t more like Bill Clinton – a skillful campaigner who overcame electoral anger and Washington division to easily win a second term.
As President Obama turns gloomier and more combative (see below for a take on why a sitting president would say Americans aren’t better off after his tenure), Clinton nostalgia, much of it stoked by Bubba himself, has come to permeate the Democratic Party.
At last weekend’s festivities in Little Rock, Ark. celebrating the 20th anniversary of the start of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, reporters saw a nostalgia trip that bordered on a rebuke for the sitting president and his lesser political gifts. The Washington Post spotted one button on a former Clinton staffer that read “It’s Still About the [Expletive] Economy, Stupid.” Another wore a T-shirt that read plainly: “I Miss Bill.”
While Democrats hold that Obama is in trouble because he lacks the political chops to face down House Republicans and connect with anxious American voters, Republicans mostly believe that Obama can’t replicate Clinton’s success because he is so ideologically rigid.
