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Barack Obama

The truth about Obama's approval rating: Paul Brandus

He leaves more popular than many of his predecessors. That may be due to pitfalls he avoided.

Paul Brandus
President Obama at the White House on Jan. 12, 2017.

You know how it is: Half the country will miss President Obama when he leaves office while, for the other half, Jan. 20 can’t come soon enough. It was like this eight years ago when Obama replaced George W. Bush and in 2001 when Bush replaced Bill Clinton. I suspect that when President-elect Donald Trump leaves four or eight years from now it’ll be the same.

Obama is leaving with his Democratic party in tatters. It’s more than losing the White House. Democrats are out of power in Congress and have lost so much ground in the states that it may take a generation for them to claw their way back.

Yet, seemingly disconnected from the electoral wipeout, the president himself is leaving with solid approval ratings. Gallup, which has been tracking presidents for three-quarters of a century, puts Obama’s approval in the mid to high 50s in his final week in office. In this deeply partisan country, half of you reading this will say that’s outrageously high, the other half way too low. Perhaps both sides will say, to use one of 2016’s big words, that’s it’s rigged. Sigh.

Context is useful. The three most popular presidents of the postwar era (World War II, that is) were Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton. As his final month in office began, Ike (in office 1953-1961) had a Gallup approval rating of 59%. Reagan (1981-1989) enjoyed 63%. Clinton (1993-2001) stood at 66%.

There was a bad recession and a major foreign policy embarassment (the U-2 affair) in the latter stage of the EIsenhower presidency, so Obama coming close to him seems reasonable. On the other hand, he's far below Reagan and Clinton, which also seems reasonable given the peace and prosperity we enjoyed during their tenures. So mid-fifties for Obama seems about right to me.

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Though he leaves office less popular than that trio, Obama is more popular than eight other post-war presidents (I’m not including the assassinated John F. Kennedy here). That sounds good, doing better than eight out of 11 predecessors. But given the troubles that beset most of them, it might not be saying all that much.

Harry Truman, criticized for economic troubles, his handling of the Korean War and firing of General Douglas MacArthur, left office in 1953 deeply reviled — with an approval rating of just 32%.

Worn down by Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969) spurned a re-election bid in 1968 and returned to Texas at 49%.

In August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned, dodging certain impeachment. His approval: 24%. Had Gerald Ford (1974-1977) not pardoned Nixon, he might have won in 1976; his final Gallup approval number was a quite respectable 53%.

The man who barely beat him, Jimmy Carter, steadily faded during his single term and left at 34%.

The most dramatic plummet belongs to George H.W. Bush. Riding high at 89% approval right after the first Persian Gulf War, he was done in by what today seems a mild recession and flip-flopping on a pledge never to raise taxes. He plunged to the low thirties and lost to Clinton. Many voters seemed to regret what they had done, though: in Bush’s final weeks in office, his approval jumped to 56%. Timing is everything.

Bush 41’s son, George W., also finished badly. That’s what will happen when you get bogged down in a war that was supposed to be a “cakewalk,” and a devastating economic collapse. He left town eight years ago at 34% approval.

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So it doesn’t take much for a departing president to do better than that.

On the other hand, it can also be argued that one reason Obama enjoys a relatively healthy approval rating is because he avoided the pitfalls of these predecessors. He’s being criticized for not doing anything about Syria — but who’s to say whether we might have gotten sucked in and bogged down like Bush in Iraq and LBJ in Vietnam? Obama haters can carp all they want, but there was no Iraq-like quagmire, no failure in the face of a Katrina-like disaster, no housing collapse, no stock market collapse, no bailouts of the banking system. There were no Nixon-like abuses, no recessions.

Republicans have whined about how the economy hasn’t grown fast enough since the Great Recession of 2007-2009. This is an implicit acknowledgment that there hasn’t been a downturn like the ones that helped do in both Bushes.

We judge presidents for what they do, but it’s also important to look at what they don’t do; at what they avoid. When you consider this side of the ledger, Obama has done better than his critics are willing to admit.

Paul Brandus, founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports, is the author of Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidencyand a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter @WestWingReport.

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