President Obama – the Mighty Duck?

The news was released that President Obama’s ratings are skyrocketing. In a recent survey, his approval rating soared to 54 percent. Some even insist that President Obama, during his last year in office, is not a “lame duck” but a “mighty duck” instead. Even the Korean media is making a great fuss about President Obama’s extraordinarily high ratings, claiming the rise is thanks to his morality and communication skills. Is it?

It is a well-known fact that President Obama was responsible for the Democratic Party’s disastrous defeat in the off-year midterm election two years ago. The incumbent president was so unpopular that Democratic candidates suggested he not show up at campaign events: They heard the sound of dropping votes whenever he made an appearance. It takes me by surprise to see his popularity, which previously hit rock bottom, suddenly rising. President Obama did nothing special to turn the table. Did he put the blast on Wall Street, the main culprit in the 2007 financial crisis? Or did he revive the middle class? Did he improve the livelihood of the American people?

There is one thing President Obama has done consistently since his inauguration: play golf. He is known to have played more than 300 games of golf since he took office as president and he has wasted a full year, out of the seven and a half years in office, golfing. President Obama recently played a round at Martha’s Vineyard after Louisiana was devastated by a “1,000-year” torrential rain.” In response, angry local media criticized him, asking, “Isn’t the president supposed to show up immediately, whether he is on vacation or not?”

Some might defend President Obama, claiming he did not visit Louisiana at once because he has no taste for putting on a “political show.” However, that is absolutely not true. In 2014, at the time of the Ferguson unrest, following the police shooting of an African American, President Obama was indulging in a game of golf on the same island. Do you know what President Obama did when a firestorm of public criticism was directed at him? He reluctantly returned to Washington, D.C., for two days, showed up shortly after at the White House, had dinner at his favorite chef Sam Kass’ apartment, and went back to the getaway. In short, he returned mostly to attend the party thrown by the chef, who was getting married. $1.1 million was spent to fly Air Force One for his visit to Washington, D.C., or 1.3 billion won was wasted for a meal with the chef. Now the media is even extending its focus to President Obama’s daughters, calling one of them the “first daughter who has a part-time job.” I recommend you check out where her job is. It is at Martha’s Vineyard: a getaway the average American can hardly hope to visit even once in a lifetime, where it sometimes costs 10 million won for a night at a lodge. The media are making noise about the part-time job the president’s daughter took on for fun, which she attends while accompanied by bodyguards, at a place like that, calling it “the humble life of the privileged.”

Given the above details, are President Obama’s high ratings reliable? If you look at those who own the media organizations that administer public opinion polls and release the results, you can find an answer to that question: most of them are giant corporations or plutocrats. Therefore, it is rational to believe that the results of the public opinion polls conducted by the media do not fully reflect the actual will of the people but are instead the tricks of plutocrats. Then why do U.S. mainstream media disguise President Obama’s rock-bottom ratings as skyrocketing ones? They do the same for Hillary Clinton. Plutocrats are reporting President Obama’s ratings as higher than they actually are to improve Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidential election. The more the incumbent president’s ratings drop, the lesser the chance his or her party has to be returned to power.

Therefore, we must realize that the trick of “President Obama’s rising ratings” is part of a meticulously planned strategy. Korean media will neither simply copy U.S. mainstream sources nor be fooled into supporting President Obama and Mrs. Clinton of the Democratic Party only because they see themselves as liberal. The frame of the Democratic Party as progress itself has long since been broken.