Rasmussen Reports has a new presidential approval rating poll out which shows that Barack Obama is plummeting once again in the esteem of the American people.

Obama’s Strong Approval rating is a miniscule 22 percent, a number which roughly corresponds to that percentage of the American people who call themselves “liberal,” while his 41 percent Strong Disapproval rating roughly corresponds to that percentage who call themselves “conservative.” The minus-19 Approval Index figure emerging from these numbers is the second-lowest (it was slightly worse on Dec. 22 as the Senate prepared to vote on its version of Obamacare) in Obama’s history to date, and the 22 percent Strong Approval figure is the worst it’s been for Obama.

Why is the president’s approval rating plummeting after a recovery of sorts following his State of the Union speech? In all likelihood it’s probably his hard-headed and ridiculous continued attempts to shove a federal seizure of the medical sector down the throats of an unwilling people. A renewed push for Obamacare in the news, at the same time the administration stands paralyzed in the face of a nuclearizing Iran, insists upon pushing climate change legislation in the face of the mushrooming evidence of fraud in its underlying basis, trots out a verifiable imbecile in Joe Biden as its spokesman on issues of gravity and can’t seem to handle something so simple as a meeting with the Dalai Lama without doing damage to American prestige, calls into question whether the president’s political strategists have so much as the slightest notion of effective governance.

On the path Obama currently travels is nothing but further political peril. He risks the destruction of his party as a viable political entity if he continues to push America to the left when in poll after poll Americans are simply not interested in such policies. One wonders if the president and his people aren’t well aware of this fact and yet are carrying out those policies anyway in the hopes that once enacted, policies like Obamacare and Cap and Trade will endure beyond his administration even if it does die horribly in 2012. The alternative – that this administration is so utterly tone-deaf as to believe it’s not the policies themselves but rather the lack of speed in bringing them into effect which is inducing Obama’s demise in the polls – suggests a level of incompetence unseen even among the worst of our modern presidents.

Regardless of the reason, the president and his people are offering little reason for the American people to have confidence in his stewardship of the nation, and dire consequences await his party in the November mid-term elections as a result.