FRANKFORT — With the passage of financial reform this week, President Barack Obama has delivered on his major campaign promises: financial stimulus, health care and financial reform.

Yet his poll numbers are at their lowest yet — his approval and disapproval ratings were both at 44 percent when he awoke Friday. There have been comparisons by his critics with Jimmy Carter, who was unable to work with Congress to enact his proposals. But the reality of the first part of Obama’s first term is in some ways more consistent with Ronald Reagan’s experience. Both moved quickly in their first terms to pass major legislation while their popularity and power were at their greatest.

So why is he doing so poorly in public opinion polls? It’s the economy, stupid. When the economy is bad, the economy is the only issue. The BP debacle in the Gulf Coast doesn’t help either, although there isn’t much Obama can do bout it.

People are fearful and they’re frustrated. They seem to think government not only can’t solve their problems but can’t even get out of its own way as CBS’ Bob Shieffer put it. Presidents often get too much blame when things go badly and too much credit when they go well. But that’s no different for Obama than for any president. Reagan saw his popularity drop but rebound. Carter’s never did. Just like Reagan and Bill Clinton, Obama faces losses in Congress in the first mid-term elections of his presidency. But Reagan and Clinton recovered. Obama’s hopes for recovery by 2012 rest on what happens between now and then with the economy.

In the meantime Republicans drool about November. Nowhere is that more on display than in Kentucky where Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul is running against deficits and debt and Obama’s financial stimulus — and subtly against Obama himself who is even more unpopular in Kentucky than he is nationally.  

For Obama and Democrats, defending the stimulus isn’t easy. People have forgotten the doomsday predictions of worldwide economic collapse by virtually every economist — on the left and on the right — in October of 2008. New Hampshire’s Republican Sen. Judd Gregg recently said Obama’s financial polices avoided a much worse economic disaster than the public will ever fully understand. But that’s not the way it looks to most people.

Saved jobs aren’t as easy to point to or prove as new ones, especially when the unemployment rate hovers at 10 percent. For many voters, government is more involved in the economy than it should be and still the economy lags badly, people go without work and those who have jobs worry they can’t keep them. That’s not likely to change by November and it looks like a Republican year. Obama has to hope it changes by 2012.

———

Jim Bunning is at it again. He said New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was smart to die this year before the possible return of the estate tax next January. Bunning, of course, has credibility on both baseball and financial planning. He’s a Hall of Fame pitcher, has an economics degree, and worked after baseball as an investment broker. He is also no fan of the Yankees, as he made clear to me — a lifelong Yankee fan — in a conversation several years ago.

Of course we Yankee fans see the timing of Steinbrenner’s passing differently. We aren’t surprised Steinbrenner held on until his Yankees won another World Series and sat in first place at the All-Star break.

Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow CNHI News Service stories on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cnhifrankfort.