President Obama, through his official mouthpiece Bob Gibbs, slammed Gallup today for its most recent poll, which indicates that Barack Obama’s approval rating is the lowest of any President’s in a half-century for this particular month (the first December in a term).

From Politico:

The White House lashed out at the Gallup Poll on Tuesday after the survey’s daily tracking numbers showed President Obama’s approval rating dropping to a new low of 47 percent.

Asked for a response to Monday’s tracking poll, which placed Obama’s approval numbers among the lowest of any recent president in December of his first year in office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs mocked the reliability of the widely respected polling firm.

“I tell you, if I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I’d visit my doctor,” Gibbs said. “If you look back, I think five days ago, there was an 11-point spread, now there’s a 1-point spread. I mean, I’m sure a 6-year-old with a crayon could do something not unlike that. I don’t put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is the daily Gallup trend.”

He added: “I don’t pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it.”

No, Obama’s slouching poll numbers are not because his Administration is pushing initiatives that are largely unpopular, rather they are a reflection of Gallup’s polling, which is clearly an operation run by 6-year olds. (/sarcasm)

Really, this Administration needs to grow up. I find their crybaby tactics tiresome and infantile. It would appear to me that the White House is run by 6-year olds, not Gallup.

Remember when the White House targeted Fox News for its less-than-flattering coverage of President Obama’s policies? Well, it appears that White House employees have decided to take on Politico, which is what I would consider one of the most respectable political news sources around. They cover pretty much everything one needs to know about what is going on in Washington.

The Atlantic has uncovered an e-mail circulating around the White House:

7 narratives politico is fighting in their efforts to get an interview with the President

1.       They are more interested in readers than accuracy
2.       Its okay to be wrong everyonce in a while, if your are the first to break the news
3.       More interested in gossip than news
4.       A spouter of the worst sort of insider conventional wisdom
5.       Their analysis about obama has been wrong more than any one
6.       Click … period
7.       More obsessed with personality than policy

This is likely in response to John Harris’ story “7 stories Barack Obama doesn’t want told.” Aside from the glaring grammatical and other basic errors, this e-mail just reads like sour grapes. Shouldn’t folks in the White House be doing something productive with their time?

The following graph should alarm even the most committed socialists (okay, maybe not the most committed):

The American Enterprise Institute, in a blog post by Nick Schulz, uncovered (with the help of J.P. Morgan research) the level of “private sector” experience from members of each President’s Cabinet since Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th Century. The study includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War (Defense), Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security.

J.P. Morgan is interested in the private sector experience from the aforementioned secretaries because they might influence economic policy made by the President.

The study examined the careers of a total of 432 Cabinet secretaries.

The average to me looks to be about 45% of employment history for those secretaries, with Eisenhower’s Administration having the most private sector experience (about 58 – 59%) and Kennedy’s Administration having the least amount of private sector experience (about 28 – 29%), excluding the Presidency of Barack Obama.

No, President Obama’s Cabinet’s private sector experience lies several standard deviations below the mean, with just about 7% of all work experience for members of Obama’s Cabinet having come from the private sector.

From Schulz’ blog post:

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

This is, in fact, remarkable. A Cabinet with almost no private sector experience should not be dictating economic policy. Your thoughts?