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The Honeymoon Is Not OverObama's challenge: get the public to like his policies as much as it likes him.

By John DickersonPosted Thursday, June 18, 2009, at 7:17 PM ET

Barack ObamaA good test of whether a marriage is still in the honeymoon phase is how accepting one spouse is of the other's irritating qualities. When a husband interrupts a wife in front of others and she thinks nothing of it, they're still honeymooners. When the same behavior initiates a kick under the table, the honeymoon is over, or at least imperiled. Fork in the thigh, forget it.

The public's honeymoon with President Obama continues, despite a recent set of polls that show some warning signs. People don't approve of his handling of the economy as much they once did, and a majority worry he doesn't have a plan to tackle the deficit. They don't like his bailouts of the car companies at all. Despite these findings, he remains personally popular, and his approval rating is pretty steady and better than it was for the last two presidents at this stage in their tenure. In the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, his favorable/unfavorable numbers are 60 percent to 29 percent, and three-quarters like him, including 27 percent who don't agree with his policies.

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This is not new. Polls have shown this split between Obama's popularity and his policies for months. They've also shown Obama's weakness in these policy areas. Since March, a variety of polls show that Obama has underpolled his popularity on the question of the deficit or his budget plans by roughly 15 points. In the April Gallup poll, 44 percent disapproved of his handling of the deficit, an almost statistically insignificant difference from the 48 percent who disapprove of his handling today.

What these numbers do help us figure out, though, is how well Obama can persuade on tough issues. He's known as a great communicator. His speeches may be powerful enough to settle colicky babies. The president and his aides also know how to narrow-cast their messages—using everything from town halls to The Late Show to the network news to make sure different audiences get the message.

Now, however, Obama is entering a rocky part of his schedule. For weeks, the president has been slowly transitioning from the first phase of his presidency, in which he was reacting to the problems he inherited, to the second, in which he's pushing the programs he campaigned on. He does not have the same power of emergency, and his opponents have a better sense of his weak spots. This makes the act of persuasion harder.

Yet there are many areas in which Obama has been persuasive. Despite considerable criticism from Republicans and conservatives like Dick Cheney over his anti-terrorism policies and his foreign policy, a recent CBS/New York Times poll showed that the president's handling of foreign policy finds favor with 59 percent of Americans. Some 57 percent favor his handling of terrorism issues. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor seems to be in a better position with the country than nominee Samuel Alito was at the same time (though this has a lot to do with Sotomayor's own qualifications, of course, and not just the president's powers to persuade).

Other issues are harder for the president. A majority of people disapprove of the president's decision to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. People also don't like his plans for rescuing Chrysler and GM. Almost seven in 10 have serious reservations about the government's ownership of GM, according to the NBC/WSJ poll.

Maybe Obama hasn't made a concerted effort to sell his policies on GM and Gitmo. There are two issues, however, that he has—and the results are not encouraging.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of Barack Obama by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Republicans and Democrats forget that during the Reagan administration, while his personal approval ratings were good the polls about his actual policies (especially domestic ones) were not - usually being below 50%. In spite of that he got elected for a second term. Perhaps the Republicans shouldn't start celebrating about these polls quite yet. At the most they only mean certain proposals will have a harder time getting passed - even with a vast Democratic majority in Washington.

-- businessanalyst
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The problem with polls only five months into a presidency is that they are going to reflect unrealistic expectations. Paul Krugman points out that when Ronald Reagan stimulated the economy with large deficits in 1981, it took 16 months before the effect was seen in unemployment statistics. President Obama's stimulus came into effect four months ago. Given the magnitude of the shock to the economy under the Bush administration, I would be very surprised to see a full recovery in Obama's first term.

-- pwoxby
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I guess I "like" him better than I like "W" and I sleep better knowing he's president but I realize now that I voted for a blank screen who allowed many, if not most of us, to project onto it/him whatever we wanted. Many of us who "saw" a progressive, or at least a progressive alternative to eight more years of the Clintons, now realize that what we really saw was a reflection of our own hopes, or more likely, desperate need for a clean sweep. We didn't get that, we won't get that and though I don't really wish I'd not voted for him, given the alternative, I won't make the mistake of political transference ever again.

-- Harmiclir
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