Has the shine come off Obama?

It's just over 200 days since Barack Obama took over as US President and the media hype surrounding him has well and truely subsided. Emily Hohler asks whether the Obama bubble has burst.

Two hundred days after he took office, the "hiss of air escaping from the Obama balloon is audible", says Rupert Cornwell in The Independent on Sunday. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed his approval rating has fallen from the mid-70s to 50%, shaving seven percentage points off his figures for June. The slump is attributed in particular to his Health Bill, a $1trn idea that promises affordable healthcare for all Americans but has stoked conservative fears that their country is "lurching towards socialism", says Imre Karacs in The Times.

Healthcare reform is proving highly contentious as it was for the Clintons in 1993-74. But Obama is attempting to do so much more, said Cornwell. There's the ambitious green energy bill, tough new regulation of the financial markets, the overhaul of foreign policy and all this when American is trying to extract itself from an economic slump. "In a way, it's surprising his ratings haven't fallen further." Obama's $787bn economic stimulus package has not proved an "instant miracle cure" and "trillion-dollar deficits stretch as far as the eye can see".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.