STUNNING - AT 8:22 A.M. ET:  The president is slipping dramatically in approval as we mark 200 days of his presidency:

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s approval rating is falling amid concerns about the U.S. economy and his push to revamp the U.S. health-care system, a Quinnipiac University poll shows.

Exactly half of the registered voters surveyed from July 27 to Aug. 3 by Quinnipiac said they approve of the job Obama is doing, compared with 42 percent who disapprove. That’s down from 57 percent approval and 33 percent disapproval in a poll taken in late June, according to results released today.

Americans are upset about rising unemployment and worried that health-care plans making their way through Congress will add to the U.S. budget deficit, said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based polling institute. The combination has helped drive down the president’s ratings.

A “willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt is, among some voters, evaporating,” Brown told reporters in Washington yesterday.

COMMENT:  There are growing illusions within the administration.  One of them is that the president's declining numbers merely reflect a failure to communicate.  No, they reflect a failure of policy...as well as a failure to communicate.   

Americans, despite all the sneering one hears from the Ivy League and the precincts of mainstream journalism, are actually quite well informed, especially about issues that affect them personaly.  They are asking intelligent questions.  They aren't getting intelligent answers, and they've started to doubt the policy prescriptions of the man at the top.

August 6, 2009