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Obama's first-year approval: 57 percent

by Mark Silva

Only one president in modern times has ended his first year in office with lower approvalviewed as an average for the yearthan the rating with which President Obama concludes his year.

Bill Clinton.

In the Gallup Poll's measures of job approval since the 1950s, Clinton's average approval during his first year was 49 percent.

With an average first-year approval of 57 percent, Gallup reports today, Obama ties Ronald Reagan for second-lowest first-year average.

It's important to remember in this context that both Clinton and Reagan went on to win second terms.

It' may not be so much Obama's first year, however, as it is his second year that presents a fuller picture of the president's performance..

It starts with Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts, on the eve of the president's anniversary in office. If pre-election polls are rightand special elections, with notoriously low voter-turnout, are difficult to predictthe president's party is in trouble there.

Losing the seat of the late and longtime senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, champion of the health-care reforms which Obama is now attempting to push through Congress, will certainly be taken as a comment on the presidency itself. Obama put his chips on the table with an 11th-hour campaign appearance in Boston.

Throughout the country, independent voters who have a way of deciding contests have grown restless during the past yearand any revolt in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, will be seen as an ominous precursor of the 2010 midterm elections.

It's not only health-care that's at stake for Obama this week. It's financial regulation, energy legislation, immigration reform and more, an ambitious domestic agenda for which a second-year president heading into volatile midterm elections will need all the help he can get.

Saving that seat, however, won't get the president's party out of the woods. Even if Democrats can hold their 60-vote grip on the Senate, pushing the final agreement that leaders reach on health-care through the Congress could be the highest hurdle Obama has faced yet.

It's not so much popularity as performance that clinches a second term.

Clinton was elected with less than 50 percent of the vote during his first bid for officebenefitting from the vote-splitting presence of the third-party Ross Perot candidacy. Obama was elected with an Electoral College landslide, albeit a modest majority of the popular vote.

George W. Bush was elected without the majority of the popular vote his first time running, yet, thanks largely to the impact that the attacks of 9/11 had on the public's view of him after a year in office, he enjoyed an average approval rating of 68 percent his first year. Public concern for national security carried him to a second term.

First-year measures of popularity may not amount to much in the long run. Performance, however, counts. And the outcome of this week's special election in the Bay State, at the threshold of Obama's second year in office, will have a great bearing on this president's performance the rest of this year.

Opponents Threaten Court Battle On Health Mandate

A major component of the health bills grinding through Congress right now is a new requirement that nearly everyone buy health insurance — a so-called individual mandate. But conservatives who oppose the health care overhaul have threatened to challenge this mandate on constitutional grounds.