Who do you prefer the least?

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is out, and the results are (not surprisingly) ugly.  

President Obama is not doing a good job as president (51% disapprove), or handling the economy (59% disapprove). On foreign policy (45% disapprove) and Libya (38% disapprove) he's doing a little better. 

On the 'Kumbaya' question - the one that asks how the respondent 'feels' about the person or group referenced by the pollster - no one does well. Obama generates the highest very negative sentiment, a mere one percentage point higher than the Tea Party, but he also has the highest very positive, slightly more than twice that of the Dems and Teas, but three times higher than the Reps.

• President Obama: 24% very positive, 30% very negative
• The Democratic Party: 11% very positive, 25% very negative
• The Republican Party: 8% very positive, 23% very negative
• The Tea Party: 11% very positive, 29% very negative

The big ugly number on the survey is that 73% of respondents feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. Hopefully, this will not be a surprise to any elected officials, or to any of the candidates out on the campaign trail. 

I've read that many of our representatives and senators took a beating at home over the August break; Obama took a beating for taking a vacation; and of course we had the childish nonsense surrounding the scheduling of the President's big jobs speech, which I think was handled poorly by everyone.  

Although politicians always say they don't pay any attention to polls, I'm hoping they take a look at this one, take the message to heart, and somehow come up with a way to move us forward.