This new CNN poll shouldn't really surprise us:
President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady....Let's start with the IRS. The message of the right is that Evil, All-Powerful Obama used his Nixonian superpowers to crush opposition. But this is a guy who can barely manage to deal out a love tap to his opposition -- yeah, he won reelection, but he lost on the sequester and he couldn't even get approval in the one house of Congress his party controls for a gun control proposal with 90% national support. You and I know his problems with Congress are the result of serious flaws in our system -- the filibuster in the Senate, gerrymandering of House districts, an opposition party determined to nullify yet another election, a press that never stops trying to blame both sides equally. But the general public just sees a president who's not particularly powerful -- and can't square that with the notion of an all-powerful partisan crushing his enemies.
According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April....
More than seven in 10 in the CNN poll say that the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of tea party and other conservative groups that were applying for tax exempt status was unacceptable....
But more than six in 10 say that the president's statements about the IRS scandal are completely or mostly true, with 35% not agreeing with Obama's characterizations. And 55% say that IRS acted on its own, with 37% saying that White House ordered the IRS to target tea party and other conservative groups.
Only 42% of the public is satisfied with how the Obama administration has handled the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, which left the U.S ambassador to that country and three other Americans dead. Fifty-three percent say they are dissatisfied. But those numbers are virtually unchanged from November.
... 59% now say that the U.S government could have prevented the attack in Benghazi, up 11 points from last November....
Wingnuts, of course, have no problem holding these two completely contradictory notions in their head simultaneously. That's just their nature. Obama is horrible in every conceivable way, even in ways that cancel other out.
The one argument wingnuts are possibly getting across to the general public is the notion that the four dead in Benghazi could have been saved -- note the uptick in the number of people who believe that. But that jibes with the center's sense of Obama as a guy who often doesn't get done what he sets out to do. The public doesn't think he wanted the Benghazi attackers to succeed -- only idiot wingnuts would believe that of the guy who ordered bin Laden killed and who sends out all those drones. The public just thinks his administration failed there, and maybe tweaked the narrative at first to downplay the errors made. The non-wingnut population doesn't see a massive coverup because Obama doesn't seem like a powerful evildoer to them. He just seems like a guy with generally good intentions who frequently falls short.
