Obama and International Perception

On the heels of my last blog based on a facebook conversation I had with a friend, I received this message from a high-school friend who is now living in Brazil-

Hey brad, I have just seen your protesting Obama pictures. I wanna ask you something... here in Brazil, we get the news that America loves Obama, is there just a small group of people that doesn't like him or its a large thing and we get manipulated information?

As I'm continuing to receive messages like this from interested friends, I may just open this up as a future feature. You can feel free to message me at facebook.com/bradtidwell1 with any political questions you may want to ask. But without further ado, this was my reply-



You pretty much always get manipulated information from news sources- actually, even here in America we often get manipulated information!

You can see from national polls that not everyone thinks Obama is doing the best job ever. In fact, many don't approve of his foreign policy- 53% from Gallup- Obama is now less popular than Hillary Clinton!
Internationally, there's a great map of foreign perception of Obama at Gallup- interestingly, while some areas have a more favorable perception of Obama, when you look at the overall picture, worldwide perception is overall negative (Russia in particular has a 20% favorability rating).

We hear from our own press that everyone loves Obama, and when nationally there are protests against the massive spending going through DC, and thousands of people march on the Hill (you can see a picture of the protesters and a video from the NRCC of the march through DC) there was little to no coverage of all of that.

The biggest thing I can say to you to prove that Obama does not have full public support is to say that the much-ballyhooed Health care reform bill has not passed congress yet. When the Democrats control the House, Senate and Executive branches of government as they do now, there should be nothing stopping them from passing something like that, but because they do not have public support, they are not able to pass it. There's even a nice video of all the people rising up against their elected public officials.

So hopefully that gives you a better understanding of where American sentiment truly lies. What is perception like there for the most part? Or do you also get distorted perceptions about your own country's opinions?

To which she replied:

Here we have the same kind of thing. Our president sucks and what we see on tv is that is god on earth.

So for all my friends all over the country who are dispirited about the way our media seems to focus on Obama and his popularity in things like his dog or his wife's wardrobe or him swatting a fly... All these things may make good press, but they aren't doing much for the one number that really matters- his re-electability poll: 43% w0uld re-elect the president according to one recent poll. And that's the one number that really matters.