Obama Suffers Steepest decline in Job Approval of Any First Year President

As President Obama contemplates his first year in office, he might be forgiven for recalling the words of Queen Elizabeth II, looking back on a year rife with royal scandal: an annus horribilus, she called it, and you don't need six years of Latin to translate her sentiments.

Mr. Obama has suffered the steepest decline in job approval of any first year president since they started keeping such data: in most surveys, he is barely at, or under fifty per cent. His health-care plan, the signature effort of his first year in office, has grown steadily less popular and its survival, as one Congressional Democrat put it, "Hangs by a thread."

It may, in fact, be doomed on the precise one-year anniversary of his Inaugural, if Massachusetts voters send a Republican to the U.S. Senate today to fill the seat held for nearly half a century, by Edward Kennedy, the patron saint of liberal health care.

The coming year does not appear to hold out hope for better times: the jobless rate is likely to remain at or above ten percent, and the real unemployment rate -- which includes those who've given up looking and those working part-time who want full time jobs -- is at 17 percent. And historically, no president in modern times has significantly improved his approval numbers in his second year -- a gloomy atmosphere in which to move into midterm elections.

What's happened: "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan," John Kennedy famously said -- but political trouble also has a thousand diagnosticians, each offering (sometimes contradictory) notions.

One of the most commonly heard refrains -- one that makes a lot of sense -- is the broad appeal that was Mr. Obama's political strength became a governing liability. As he himself once said, he was a vessel into which people poured their own political desires. He was the tribune of progressivism, the man to redeem the promise of Robert Kennedy. No, he was the post-conflict president, the candidate who promised to "turn the page" on the wearisome conflicts of the past.

Because so many people expected Mr. Obama to do so many different, conflicting things, he could not possibly hold those who voted for him together. More important, he did not come to office with a strong sense of where he was going. - CBS News Story