Crackhead Toronto Mayor Has A Higher Approval Rating Than Barack Obama

by Ben Bullard

Rob Ford, the scandal-plagued Toronto mayor who’s been outed on video smoking what appears to be crack cocaine — and who even admitted before the city council this week that he recently purchased illegal drugs — has a higher approval rating among his constituency than President Barack Obama has among Americans.
Just to be clear, we’re talking about this guy, a guy who admits to hitting the crack pipe but has “zero tolerance” for drugs, guns and gangs:

Ford’s approval rating may be higher than it should be, but it’s not high. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) found that Toronto voters are holding steady on Ford, who maintains an approval rating of 44 percent in spite of the crack scandal.
Obama doesn’t have a crack scandal (well, not one that anybody’s saying much about, anyway); but he does have a Hydra of other self-made problems, almost all of which have consistently driven down his approval ratings throughout his still-nascent second term. A Pew survey released last week shows Obama faces high disapproval on every policy point except terrorism.
A Quinnipiac poll released yesterday showed Obama’s overall approval rating at 39 percent — the lowest point in his five years as President. Even among women, considered a barometer of the health of a Democratic President, Obama is losing trust, polling a 51 percent disapproval rate compared with only 40 percent of women who approval of the job he’s done.
Similarly, Obama is losing the public trust. “For the first time today, American voters say 52 – 44 percent that Obama is not honest and trustworthy,” Quinnipiac reports. “His previous lowest marks on honesty were May 30, when 49 percent of voters said he was honest and 47 percent said he wasn’t.”
Here’s more:

"Like all new presidents, President Barack Obama had a honeymoon with American voters, with approval ratings in the high 50s. As the marriage wore on, he kept his job approval scores in the respectable, though not overwhelming, 40s. Today, for the first time it appears that 40 percent floor is cracking,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
“Any Democrat with an 11-point approval deficit among women is in trouble. And any elected official with an 8-point trust deficit is in serious trouble.”
Obama’s approval rating now has sunk to the same figure George W. Bush earned among voters at the same point during his second term, though he’s getting hammered far less in mainstream media for it."