Tag: Obama

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Disheartened N.J. veterans, families wonder if the sacrifice in Iraq, Afghanistan was worth it

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Disheartened N.J. veterans, families wonder if the sacrifice in Iraq, Afghanistan was worth it

JUNE 12, 2014, 6:30 PM    LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2014, 11:45 PM
BY MATTHEW MCGRATH, JIM NORMAN AND ABBOTT KOLOFF
STAFF WRITERS
THE RECORD

Discouragement. Sadness. Renewed heartache for lives lost. Resignation: that feeling of having known from the start how it would end.

And all of it profoundly felt.

The full-blown Islamist offensive in Iraq is sparking those feelings, and more, in North Jersey veterans and families who sacrificed time and blood to a sense of patriotic duty in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are keeping close watch on the situation — and are wholly disappointed with the failure of American-trained and -equipped government forces.

Related: Obama: US will send fresh help to beleaguered Iraq

“This is a prime example of what failing to complete a mission looks like, and this is what Afghanistan will look like in the future,” said Matt Bombace, a former Marine infantry sergeant who fought in Iraq in 2005 and at 27 is the youngest man to serve as commander of the Washington Elm VFW Post 192 in Ridgewood.

But more to the emotional point for many was the reaction of John Walter Wroblewski of Jefferson, who has visited the spot in Iraq where his Marine son, John Thomas, was fatally shot in 2004.

“Did our sons die in vain?” Wroblewski, the longtime athletic director at Palisades Park High School, wondered. “I am extremely proud of my son. I am proud of what he did. All the blood that was spilled just in taking Ramadi, and here we are giving it back. It’s just disheartening.”

Related: Iraq Sunni militant group vows to march on Baghdad

Dozens of North Jersey men died between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the U.S. departure in 2011. Thousands of New Jerseyans in active duty, reserve and National Guard units fought there, in Afghanistan or both. The largest combat deployment of the state’s National Guard since World War II — 2,900 from the “Jersey Blues” 50th Infantry Brigade Combat team — was in Iraq in 2008.

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/disheartened-n-j-veterans-families-wonder-if-the-sacrifice-in-iraq-afghani

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Anger explodes over treatment of Bergdahl’s release as veterans, troops call him a deserter

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Anger explodes over treatment of Bergdahl’s release as veterans, troops call him a deserter

BY HANNAH ALLAM AND JONATHAN S. LANDAY

McClatchy Washington BureauJune 2, 2014 

WASHINGTON — For all the yellow ribbons strewn across his hometown in Idaho and the gratitude expressed by his parents in an emotional visit to the White House on Saturday, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to the United States after nearly five years in Taliban captivity.

From military forums across the country, a groundswell of anger is rising over the Obama administration’s silence on perhaps the most controversial question surrounding the deal that freed Bergdahl in exchange for five senior Taliban members: Was he a deserter?

So far, the U.S. government has shied away from the long-nagging question, which raged anew Monday with growing clamor on the Internet about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance from his unit’s small forward position in Afghanistan on June 30, 2009.

Military-related blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages were filled with screeds from commenters accusing Bergdahl of being a “traitor” or a Taliban “collaborator.” The online publication The Daily Beast published a nearly 2,000-word first-person account by a former Army infantry officer who said he was privy to details of Bergdahl’s disappearance and who stated flatly that “he was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.”

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/02/229148/anger-explodes-over-treatment.html#storylink=cpy

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Jeffrey Toobin: Obama ‘Clearly Broke the Law’ on Bergdahl

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Jeffrey Toobin: Obama ‘Clearly Broke the Law’ on Bergdahl

by Noah Rothman | 5:50 pm, June 2nd, 2014

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin declared on Monday that President Barack Obama “broke the law” when his administration failed to give Congress notice of at least 30 days before releasing five ranking Taliban members from Guantanamo Bay. Toobin said that a presidential signing statement did not absolve Obama from culpability for failing to abide by the law mandating congressional notification.

“I think he clearly broke the law,” Toobin said. “The law says 30-days’ notice. He didn’t give 30-days’ notice.” Toobin added that Obama’s opinion expressed in a signing statement “is not law.”

“The law is on the books, and he didn’t follow it,” Toobin added.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer noted that former President George W. Bush also issued signing statements even though they thought their action may not have been constitutional or legal. “But liberals were outraged by George W. Bush’s signing statements,” Toobin noted.

“You realize, of course, you’re accusing the President of the United States of breaking the law” Blitzer observed.

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/jeffrey-toobin-obama-clearly-broke-the-law-on-bergdahl/

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Fournier: VA Scandal ‘One of the Lowest Points’ of Obama’s Presidency

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Fournier: VA Scandal ‘One of the Lowest Points’ of Obama’s Presidency

By Andrew Johnson
May 22, 2014 10:15 AM

President Obama’s poor handling of the mismanagement at the Department of Veterans Affairs could plague his presidency as an all-time low point, saysNational Journal’s Ron Fournier.

“The fact of the matter is the political response to this thing has been both dishonest and way too weak,” he said on Wednesday’s Special Report. “I think this may be one of the lowest points of his presidency.”

Fournier said not only has the Obama administration been misleading in its response to allegations of incidents of malpractice in VA facilities across the country that led to the death of several veterans waiting for care, but also that President Obama has failed to live up to his promise to improve the department.

“The president has known the VA has been a mess for a long time, and hasn’t done anything to get it fixed,” he said. “It’s gotten worse recently — at least for the last two years, we’ve known we’ve had these problems and nothing’s been done.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/378574/fournier-va-scandal-one-lowest-points-obamas-presidency-andrew-johnson

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He KNEW! Obama told of Veterans Affairs health care debacle as far back as 2008

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He KNEW! Obama told of Veterans Affairs health care debacle as far back as 2008

The Obama administration received clear notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care — problems that have turned into a growing scandal.

Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.

“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying — and potentially denying — deserving veterans timely care,” the officials wrote.

The briefing materials, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the problems existed well before Mr. Obama took office, dating back at least to the Bush administration. But the materials raise questions about what actions the department took since 2009 to remedy the problems.

In recent months, reports have surfaced about secret wait lists at facilities across the country and, in the case of a Phoenix VA facility, accusations that officials cooked the books to try to hide long wait times. Some families said veterans died while on a secret wait list at the Phoenix facility.


Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/18/obama-warned-about-va-wait-time-problems-during-20/#ixzz32FCzso7K 

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Veterans scandal risks engulfing Obama

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Veterans scandal risks engulfing Obama
May 16, 2014 5:40 pm
By Geoff Dyer in Washington

Amid contrived outrage over Benghazi and the improving fortunes of its healthcare reform, the Obama administration could be facing a genuine scandal about its treatment of military veterans that has the potential to attract broad political condemnation of its competence.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is facing mounting evidence that some of the hospitals it runs have been keeping two sets of books to make it look as if they were reducing waiting times to see a doctor

More damning, the department is investigating the claims of a whistleblower doctor in Arizona that dozens of patients at one hospital died while they were languishing on a hidden waiting list without ever being given an appointment.

Richard Griffin, the department’s acting inspector general, admitted on Thursday that its review could lead to criminal charges. In the first political casualty of the scandal, Robert Petzel, the department’s undersecretary for heath, resigned on Friday.

If the evidence of mismanagement continues to accumulate, the Obama administration will find itself not in another partisan knife-fight, but under fire from both parties in a Congress where the uniformed military is venerated.

The veterans’ healthcare scandal is, in part, one of the unintended consequences of the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq, which have created “our 9/11 generation who have served with honour in more than a decade of war,” as President Barack Obama described them on Thursday.

More than 970,000 veterans from those wars have filed disability claims, taking the total enrolled in the VA system to 8.57m by the end of 2012.

https://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/328546c0-dd10-11e3-8546-00144feabdc0.html#axzz31xV3xAMc

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Obama has Proposed 442 Tax Hikes Since Taking Office

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Obama has Proposed 442 Tax Hikes Since Taking Office

Since taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama has formally proposed a total of 442 tax increases, according to an Americans for Tax Reform analysis of Obama administration budgets for fiscal years 2010 through 2015.

The 442 total proposed tax increases does not include the 20 tax increases Obama signed into law as part of Obamacare.

“History tells us what Obama was able to do. This list reminds us of what Obama wanted to do,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

The number of proposed tax increases per year is as follows:

-79 tax increases for FY 2010

-52 tax increases for FY 2011

-47 tax increases for FY 2012

-34 tax increases for FY 2013

-137 tax increases for FY 2014

-93 tax increases for FY 2015

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Obama budget with the lowest number of proposed tax increases was released during an election year: In February 2012, Obama released his FY 2013 budget, with “only” 34 proposed tax increases. Once safely re-elected, Obama came back with a vengeance, proposing 137 tax increases, a personal record high for the 44th President.

In addition to the 442 tax increases in his annual budget proposals, the 20 signed into law as part of Obamacare, and the massive tobacco tax hike signed into law on the sixteenth day of his presidency, Obama has made it clear he is open to other broad-based tax increases.

During an interview with Men’s Health in 2009, when asked about the idea of national tax on soda and sugary drinks, the President said, “I actually think it’s an idea that we should be exploring.”

During an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood in 2010, Obama said a European-style Value-Added-Tax was “something that would be novel for the United States.”

Obama’s statement was consistent with a pattern of remarks made by Obama White House officials refusing to rule out a VAT.

“Presidents are judged by history based on what they did in power. But presidents can only enact laws when the Congress agrees,” said Norquist. “Thus a record forged by such compromise tells you what a president — limited by congress — did rather than what he wanted to do.”

Read more: https://www.atr.org/obama-has-proposed-442-tax-hikes-taking-office#ixzz2ywy1aEkN
Follow us: @taxreformer on Twitter

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IRS Scandal Continues: An IRS Employee Urged People to Reelect Obama

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IRS Scandal Continues: An IRS Employee Urged People to Reelect Obama
Hans von Spakovsky
April 13, 2014 at 12:03 pm

The latest news from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) about illegal political activities at the IRS will certainly not help the administration’s (and Representative Elijah Cummings’) current narrative that there is not a “smidgen of corruption” at the IRS.

OSC is an independent agency that investigates violations of the civil service rules that govern federal employees and the federal statute that protects whistleblowers, as well as violations by federal employees of the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activity of civil servants. One of those rules is an absolute prohibition on partisan political speech and activity in the federal workplace.

On April 9, OSC announced that it was seeking “significant disciplinary action” against an IRS customer-service representative who fielded taxpayer questions on the IRS customer-service helpline. Apparently, the IRS employee “urged taxpayers to reelect President Obama in 2012 by repeatedly reciting a chant based on the spelling of his last name.” OSC did not indicate what the “chant” was, and a spokesman for OCS told me he could not reveal the chant because of privacy rules, since it spelled out the employee’s name.

Another tax specialist in the Kentucky office of the IRS was given a 14-day suspension for telling a taxpayer she was “for” the Democrats because “Republicans already [sic] trying to cap my pension and…they’re going to take women back 40 years.” The tax specialist added that her mother told her that “if you vote for a Republican, the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer.”

Unfortunately for the tax specialist, the taxpayer recorded the illicit telephone conversation. The recording even caught the IRS employee telling the taxpayer that “I’m not supposed to voice my opinion so you didn’t hear me saying that.” This particular IRS employee had been advised about the restrictions of the Hatch Act on this type of behavior “just weeks before the conversation,” according to the OSC.

The OSC also announced it had “issued cautionary guidance to all IRS employees” in the Dallas Taxpayer Assistance Center after it received complaints that the employees were “wearing pro-Obama political stickers, buttons, and clothing to work and displaying pro-Obama screensavers on their IRS computers.” It turned out that this was “commonplace throughout the office.” It makes one wonder how much of this was going on in other IRS offices where no one complained.

And it is more evidence that there is bias and partisan political behavior spread throughout the IRS, and not just in the Washington office where Lois Lerner worked before she retired to a nice federal pension.

Originally published in The National Review Online.

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As Obama Spotlights Gender Gap in Wages, His Own Payroll Draws Scrutiny

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As Obama Spotlights Gender Gap in Wages, His Own Payroll Draws Scrutiny

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and ANNIE LOWREYAPRIL 7, 2014

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday will call attention to what he has said is an “embarrassment” in America: the fact that women make, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns.

But critics of the administration are eager to turn the tables and note that Mr. Obama’s White House fares only slightly better. A study released in January showed that female White House staff members make on average 88 cents for every dollar a male staff member earns.

The dueling statistics reveal the political sensitivities around a set of gender-related issues that could be critical in the midterm elections this fall. Those include pay equity, family leave, preschool and child care.

Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies are trying to portray Republicans as insensitive to the concerns of women, in the hopes of capitalizing on the kind of lopsided female support that helped Mr. Obama win the White House in 2008 and 2012. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama is to sign an executive order barring federal contractors from penalizing employees who discuss their compensation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/us/politics/as-obama-spotlights-gender-gap-in-wages-his-own-payroll-draws-scrutiny.html?_r=0

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Vatican Chief Justice: Obama’s Policies ‘Have Become Progressively More Hostile Toward Christian Civilization’

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Vatican Chief Justice: Obama’s Policies ‘Have Become Progressively More Hostile Toward Christian Civilization’

March 24, 2014 11:14 AM

VATICAN CITY (CBS St. Louis) — The Vatican’s chief justice feels that President Barack Obama’s policies have been hostile toward Christians.

In an interview with Polonia Christiana magazine –and transcribed by Life Site News — Cardinal Raymond Burke said that Obama “promotes anti-life and anti-family policies.”

“It is true that the policies of the president of the United States have become progressively more hostile toward Christian civilization. He appears to be a totally secularized man who aggressively promotes anti-life and anti-family policies,” Burke told the magazine.

The former archbishop of St. Louis stated that Obama is trying to “restrict” religion.

https://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2014/03/24/vatican-chief-justice-obamas-policies-ha

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Why millennials have abandoned Obama

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Why millennials have abandoned Obama

By Dana Milbank, Published: March 14

The day before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, I wrote about the massive crowds of young people at Barack Obama rallies, noting that his candidacy would collapse “if they don’t show up.”

The next night, after Obama’s victory celebration in Des Moines, Obama strategist Steve Hildebrand spotted me in a crowd. “The kids showed up!” he said fiercely.

They did. But where are they now?

An army of 15 million voters under 30 swept Obama past Hillary Clinton and John McCain and to the presidency in 2008. More than 12 million helped him return in 2012. But now his presidency is on the line — and the Obama youth are abandoning him in his hour of need.

The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act.

The administration had said it needed 40 percent of registrants in the health insurance exchanges to be young adults, or about 2.7 million of the expected 7 million total. Overall enrollment is also below target. But the alarming shortcoming is the number of young participants, which would make the insured population older and sicker and the program too expensive.

This week saw the release of Obama’s sit-down with comedian Zach Galifianakis, of “The Hangover” fame, to encourage the young to join the Obamacare exchanges. It was good comedy (the host, in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, rolled up his sleeve to show Obama his “spider bites”), and according to the White House it had the desired result: a boost in traffic to HealthCare.gov. Yet the fact that Obama sought Galifianakis’s help was an indication of how much the president’s standing has slipped among young Americans. Six years earlier, he had been a demigod among that demographic.

What went wrong? The president and his aides failed to keep his youth movement engaged. But part of the problem also is the inability of the millennial generation to remain attached to a cause. The generation that brought Obama to power is connected online but has no loyalty to institutions — including, it turns out, the Obama White House.

In 2008, “the level of innovation and engagement in the election, especially the primaries, was amazing, but then the level of engaging them during the administration was extremely disappointing,” says Peter Levine, a Tufts University professor who specializes in youth civic involvement. “He had a potential army for legislative success and implementation, but the Obama administration did not do that. At a critical moment in the first term, they did not turn to them. . . . They got rapid youth demobilization.”

Young voters, after playing a big role in the campaign, became little more than an e-mail list for the White House and Obama’s Organizing for Action group. Then came health-care reform. The millennials, very liberal overall, saw Obama’s plan as too timid; they were disillusioned by his failure to fight for the “public option” of government-run health plans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obama-has-a-problem-connecting-to-young-on-health-care/2014/03/14/1e6c5f40-ab95-11e3-98f6-8e3c562f9996_print.html

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Poll: 71% of Obama voters, 55% Democrats ‘regret’ voting for his re-election

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Poll: 71% of Obama voters, 55% Democrats ‘regret’ voting for his re-election
BY PAUL BEDARD | FEBRUARY 18, 2014 AT 2:45 PM

Over seven in 10 Obama voters, and 55 percent of Democrats, regret voting for President Obama’s reelection in 2012, according to a newEconomist/YouGov.com poll.

Conducted to test the media hype about a comeback by 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the new poll found voters still uninspired by Romney, but also deeply dissatisfied with Obama who has so far failed to capitalize on his victory over 15 months ago.

The poll asked those who voted for Obama’s reelection a simple question: “Do you regret voting for Barack Obama?”

— Overall, 71 percent said yes, 26 percent no.

— 80 percent of whites said yes, 61 percent of blacks said no and 100 percent of Hispanics said yes.

— 84 percent of women said yes, and just 61 percent of men agreed.

— 55 percent of Democrats said yes, as did 71 percent of independents.

After Secrets first published their poll, YouGov.com noted that the sample for the question was small and recharacterized the sample as “those who reported voting for Barack Obama in 2012 but would vote for someone else if the election were held again” from “those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012.”

https://washingtonexaminer.com/poll-71-of-obama-supporters-regret-voting-for-his-reelection/article/2544165

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Rand Paul: When Will Obama Start Caring?

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Rand Paul: When Will Obama Start Caring?
by Sen. Rand Paul 7 Feb 2014

Just when you thought Obamacare couldn’t get any worse, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported on Tuesday that the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs will be lost due to Obamacare.

We can’t afford to lose any more jobs.

These numbers are calculated according to how many work hours the CBO estimates will be lost in the coming decade. Reuters reports, “In its latest U.S. fiscal outlook, the nonpartisan CBO said the health law would lead some workers, particularly those with lower incomes, to limit their hours to avoid losing federal subsidies that Obamacare provides to help pay for health insurance and other healthcare costs.”

Reuters continues, “Work hours would be reduced by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024, said the agency, which earlier predicted 800,000 fewer full-time jobs by 2021. The bottom line would be a slower rate of growth for employment and compensation in the coming decade, according to the report.”

This is yet another example of the damage Obamacare has continued to inflict since its implementation.

https://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/02/07/rand-paul-obamacare-cbo

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Mitch McConnell: Obama, IRS Fight to Keep Conservative Nonprofits from Forming

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Mitch McConnell: Obama, IRS Fight to Keep Conservative Nonprofits from Forming

by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) 30 Jan 2014 406 post a comment

James Madison had it exactly right.

Referring to infringements on our freedoms, the Father of the Bill of Rights once wrote that such encroachments were more often “gradual and silent” than “violent and sudden.”

That’s exactly what we’re seeing with President Obama’s proposed regulation on so-called 501(c)(4) groups: a stealth attempt to stifle the ability of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process.

The administration’s proposal, quietly floated over Thanksgiving, is just the latest in a long line of attempts to skirt the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United, which basically said that businesses and independent groups have the same right to free speech under the First Amendment as anybody else.

https://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/30/Exclusive-Mitch-McConnell-Obama-Attempts-to-Prevent-Conservative-Nonprofits-from-Forming

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Crisis of Confidence Poll: 63% Don’t Have Confidence in Obama to Make Right Decisions

President Obama Makes Statement On The Sequestration

Crisis of Confidence Poll: 63% Don’t Have Confidence in Obama to Make Right Decisions

A majority of Americans. 51 percent, also believe Obama is not a strong leader.

n the eve of President Obama’s State of the Union Address, a new poll from Washington Post-ABC News shows that fully 63 percent of Americans have either little no confidence Obama will make the right decisions. The public is evenly split on whether Obama is honest and trustworthy, with 49 percent of Americans answering in the affirmative, and 48 percent answering negatively.

A bare majority of Americans, 52 percent, feel Obama does not understand the problems of people like them – a shocking downward turn for Obama on an important likeability issue on which he dominated in 2012. A majority of Americans. 51 percent, also believe Obama is not a strong leader. His disapproval rating stands currently at 50 percent, with 41 percent disapproving strongly – only 23 percent support him strongly. 50 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the president.

https://www.truthrevolt.org/news/poll-63-dont-have-confidence-obama-make-right-decisions