As president Barack Obama’s approval rating hits the lowest mark of any president in history at this stage, critics are again asking can things get any worse any for him and his incompetent administration?

As problems continue to mount and the president’s approval ratings continue to sink — the latest Rasmussen poll has Obama’s approval rating down to 44 percent, a new low — there are a lot of different, and damaging, story lines developing around the Obama administration. You can add a lack of basic competence to the list.

To take just one example from yesterday: on NBC’s Meet the Press, White House economic adviser Christina Romer was asked if the recession was over. Her first answer was that according to the “official definition … I think we have, at least in terms of GDP, reached that point”… When Romer was then asked, “So in your mind, this recession is not over,” she answered, “Of course not. We have — you know, for, for the people on Main Street and throughout this country, they are still suffering. The unemployment rate is still 10 percent.”

Now compare her answer with that given by Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers on ABC’s This Week:

“Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be.”

According to columnist Peter Wehner, these and other missteps will extract a toll on the Democrats when voters go to the polls come 2010.

Still, add these incidents to others and you have a picture emerging of an administration and a party that are not only overmatched by events but that also look downright pitiable at times. This is the kind of thing, especially so early in the life of an administration, that can easily become a proxy for a wider inability to govern. Come 2010, voters are likely to extract a cost for this. Read More…