Where Is the Love? Obama’s TV Audience Steadily Dwindling, His SOTU Audience This Week Was Smaller Than Either Bush’s or Clinton’s at 3-Year Mark
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on January 26, 2012
The 'Everywhere' President: Pres. Obama's TV audience for his State of the Union address this week was smaller than it was for either Bush or Clinton at the 3-year mark
Regular, hardworking Americans are getting pretty darned weary of seeing Barack H. Obama here, there, and everywhere, jetting back and forth across the nation on Air Force One every week since he took office.
Look, he’s in Disney World in Florida, wanting to meet Mickey Mouse! Look, he’s crooning an Al Green song at the Apollo in New York! Another round of golf, no problem, another vacation, no problem, another appearance on The View, no problem!
But wait, now Obama is off to Arizona and being snotty and dismissive of Gov. Jan Brewer’s illegal immigration problems because she doesn’t fawn all over him in her new book! Wow, now he’s smiling and drinking and dining with those evil 1-percenter liberal millionaires and billionaires, wooing them for donations! Oh, hey, he has time to mail a birthday card to sitcom actress Zoey Deschanel! Wait, now he’s driving around the country in a million-dollar, made-in-Canada rock star bus, not once, but TWICE!
It just never ends with President Zero. So the news that Obama’s SOTU audience viewership numbers sucked swamp water comes as no surprise.
From CNS News, Obama’s SOTU Audience Continues to Shrink; Smaller Than Bush’s and Clinton’s Three Years In:
(CNSNews.com) – President Obama has attracted an increasingly smaller U.S. television audience to each year’s State of the Union address, with the estimated 37.75 million people who watched his speech on Tuesday not much bigger than President Bush’s smallest SOTU audience – 37.51 million in his final year in office.
According to Nielsen Media Research, an estimated 37,752,613 million watched Obama’s address on Capitol Hill on one of the 14 networks airing it, which included ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC.
The figure continues a trend of diminishing audiences. Obama’s 2009 speech to Congress – not officially a State of the Union since he had only taken office days earlier – drew a television audience of 52,373,000, according to Nielsen.
In 2010, his State of the Union (SOTU) attracted 48,009,595 viewers and by 2011 the number had dropped to 42,789,947.
(Obama’s announcement last May about the killing of Osama bin Laden, televised live, attracted 56.5 million viewers across nine networks, according to Nielsen data – bigger than any of his four January speeches on Capitol Hill.)
[...]
Bush’s TV audience jumped significantly between his 2001 speech to Congress (39.8 million) and the post-9/11 SOTU the following January (51.7 million). It then climbed further to 62 million in 2003 – weeks before the invasion of Iraq began – then declined in 2004 and 2005, picked up again in 2006 and 2007, before dropping to the low of 37.5 million in 2008, his valedictory SOTU.
Clinton accounted for both the largest and smallest viewerships of the last three presidents – a high of 66.9 million in 1993 (also not officially a SOTU) to a low of 31.5 million in 2000, his last year in office.
Between those highs and lows, Clinton’s audiences gradually declined between 1994 and 1996, but grew again in 1997 and jumped significantly in 1998 – when the SOTU came one day after the president during a nationally-televised press conference denied having “sexual relations” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky – before dropping off again in 1999 and 2000.
Good post at The Heritage Foundation, here’s the opening… What Did Obama Omit From His State of the Union Address?:
Speaking last night from the U.S. Capitol, President Barack Obama described the state of the Union as he sees it — strong and getting stronger, with future growth fueled by his pursuit of progressive policies and an expansion of government, all architected to bring about his brand of “fairness.” The President essentially redelivered his 2011 State of the Union address — complete with the same empty rhetoric, class warfare cloaked in “fairness,” and proposals for massive tax and spending increases.
The speech was notable for the items he did not mention, including many of the failed spending programs and policies he undertook over the past three years, the foreign policy and defense challenges he has exacerbated, and the economic actions he failed to take that would have created jobs and spurred economic growth.
Overexposure and costly miscalculations has killed many a career, whether it be in politics, business, or entertainment. As has ineptitude, whining, blaming, petulance, arrogance, blundering, lying, bullying, and ignoring the voices of the majority of American voters (not to be confused with embracing the majority of voices in the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everything movement).
The nation’s falling interest in what the Current Occupier had to say this week about our country’s sorry state of affairs, the economic disaster that he has made far worse than anyone ever imagined, should worry Democrats plenty.
Obama said nothing new in this State of the Union/please-reelect-me campaign speech, nor offered any actual plan to help the country, but rather, we got another rehashed, preposterous wish list filled with fabrications and fact-challenged proclamations.
While the president claims that he wants to help create new jobs for the nation’s unemployed, he casually killed the Keystone XL pipeline, effectively also killing thousands upon thousands of anticipated jobs. Likewise with NASA and the space program. He claims he wants to reel in federal spending, while proposing more expensive government departments, more Nanny State welfare entitlements, more debt to saddle our grandchildren with.
We deserve a better president than this.
2009 Photo: From CNN to Men's Journal, Obama made himself the 'Everywhere President' | Photo credit: AP
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