Gallup On American Feeling About The State Of The Union: ‘M’eh’

President Barack Obama
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In advance of President Obama’s State Of The Union address tonight, Gallup polled the country to gauge America’s take on the the state of things one year after Obama took office. What Gallup found was a nation collectively shrugging its shoulders, saying “M’eh.”

About a fourth of Americans are “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States,” according to the poll released this evening. That’s up from 13% of Americans who told Gallup the same thing in January of last year. But 76% percent of respondents this week said they were dissatisfied, a big increase over the 57% dissatisfaction average Gallup has recorded since 1976.

There have been slight upticks in the national feeling about the economy and in the number of Americans who say their company is hiring since this time in 2009. Overall, though, the country is still in a funk over the national economy and Obama’s performance in office.

“President Obama can rightly point out real improvements in Americans’ evaluations of the country and the economy since he took office,” the pollster writes. “However, his deteriorating approval ratings — dropping from 68% when he took office to 48% today — are a meaningful indicator that those improvements fall well short of what Americans expected from him.”

Obama may be able to continue to lift the national spirit with his speech tonight, but it’s unlikely his address will solve his approval rating problem. As Gallup reported earlier this week, State Of The Union addresses rarely if ever lift a president’s approval ratings in any real way — of the past five presidents, only Bill Clinton saw an overall rise in his averaged approval ratings from the State Of the Union. And even then, it was only 3%. Obama, like Clinton, is known for giving a rousing and engaging speech, so he might find the state of his support on the rise after tonight, if only a little.

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