Poll shows Americans in a funk

WASHINGTON (AP) — The euphoria of 2008 is over: America is in a funk.

Elected last November on a wave of optimism, President Barack Obama now finds himself governing an increasingly pessimistic country in recession while muscling through Congress a health-care-reform overhaul and weighing whether to commit more troops to the eight-year-old Afghanistan war.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll shows that Americans grew slightly more dispirited on a range of matters over the past month, continuing slippage that has occurred since Obama took office as the year began.

That is troubling for a president trying to accomplish an ambitious agenda at home while fighting wars abroad, as well as for a Democratic Party heading into a critical election year in which it will look to stave off losses a new president typically experiences in his first midterms.

Obama’s approval rating stands at 54 percent, roughly the same as in October but very different from what it was in January just before he took office, 74 percent. And some 56 percent of people say the country is heading in the wrong direction, an uptick from 51 percent last month and 49 percent in Obama’s first month as president.

Many more people said the economy got worse in the past month as said it got better — and it’s not many people who thought it got better, just 22 percent. Most say the economy stayed the same, and most don’t approve of how Obama is handling it — just 46 percent approve compared with 50 percent last month.

On the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with October, 45 percent of people now disapprove of Obama’s handling of Iraq, up from 37 percent, while 48 percent now disapprove of his handling of Afghanistan, up from 41 percent; a majority of people in the country opposes both wars.

On health care, about half of the country approves of how Obama is doing on his signature domestic issue — virtually unchanged from October.