1 Year Later, How's Obama Doing?

Whether or not Tuesday's voting turns out to be a referendum on President Obama, people are already making it clear how they feel about his job performance one year after his election.

Obama has a 54 percent approval rating in a new CNN poll, nearly matching the 53 percent of the vote he got last November. What's changed in a year is that he's gained popularity among liberals and lost it among conservatives. And while the president remains above 50 percent in overall approval, most of the Americans CNN surveyed don't like the way he's dealt with such key issues as unemployment, health care and Afghanistan.




Confidence in the way the U.S. is fighting terrorism has dropped 21 points since Obama took office to 34 percent, according to a Rasmussen survey. That's the lowest since the beginning of 2007.

While most people are dissatisfied with Obama's handling of the economy, a Fox News poll shows President Bush still gets the bulk of the blame for the country's financial woes.

Politics Daily has a breakdown of Obama's ratings in eight states and compares those numbers to last year's election results.

In Iowa, which helped put Obama on the road to the White House, The New York Times found a lot of voters who supported him now have second thoughts. The president's approval in the state fell to 53 percent in September, down 11 points from April.

The Daily Beast put the question of Obama's performance to a variety of commentators, including Walter Issacson, who thinks the president deserves more credit for averting a financial meltdown, and Monica Crowley, who says the man who promised change is turning out to be just another politician.

Arianna Huffington looks back a year and laments that the "Yes We Can" tide Obama rode into office has turned to timidity. The administration needs to rekindle its early spark and "get its mojo back," she says.

On the other end of the spectrum, Rush Limbaugh dismisses the president as immature and inexperienced and predicts he will not win a second term.

And while everyone else argues over Obama one year later, DoubleX's Emily Bazelon imagines what we'd be saying if Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the election.