The President's Shrinking Constituency

The poll numbers are staggering.

An August CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey indicates that 68 percent of Americans oppose the building of a mosque near Ground Zero.

Seventy-three percent of Americans favor requiring "people to produce documents to verify legal status," one of the components of the Arizona immigration law, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in May. In the same poll, 59% approved of the entire Arizona immigration law.

Rasmussen Reports found in March that 54 percent of us oppose the President's health care legislation. According to a June Gallup poll, among those over the age of 65, 60 percent see the healthcare reform bill as a "bad thing."

In July, another CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 57 percent of those polled disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling the economy.

The President has variously been described as "disconnected from mainstream America" (Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn), "really out of touch" (Elaine Donnelly, President, Center for Military Readiness), "tone deaf" (Dorothy Rabinowitz), and "divorced from the values and concerns of his countrymen" (Jennifer Rubin).

But perhaps the most damning - or "defining" - numbers as regards the President's relationship with the American people are seen in a recent Pew Research poll that asked more than 3,000 people about Obama's religion. In the survey, taken between between July 21 and August 5, nearly one in five (18 percent) said that our President is a Muslim, up from 11 percent a little more than a year ago. Obama claims to be a Christian, and 34 percent of respondents in the Pew survey gave that answer. But, adding to the conundrum, 43 percent of Pew respondents said they did not know what the President's religion was.

Perhaps those who are confused about whether Obama is a Christian, as he claims to be, can be forgiven. Obama essentially mocked the Christian Bible in a speech in June, 2006: "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?"

And people haven't forgotten that he ordered Christian symbols to be covered up when he delivered a speech at Georgetown University in April, 2009. Nor have they forgotten that he spent 20 years in a supposedly Christian church run by the anti-American bigot, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

In trying to determine the President's religion, perhaps the people have factored in his unproductive attempts to offer an open hand to Islamist radicals such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and see them as an indication that Obama's loyalties are to Islam, the faith into which he was born, and not to Christianity.

Further, it's laughable to hear Obama trot out the "constitutional rights" argument in defense of the Ground Zero mosque. As is typical of leftist Democrats, Obama only mentions the constitution if he can use it to undermine the very values and way of life that document articulates. He has thumbed his nose at most of the American people, demonstrating that not only is he unwilling to perform his constitutional duty to secure our nation's borders, he's taking Arizona to court to defend his right not to secure them.

In the face of the overwhelming popular opposition to the President's positions on so many critical issues, the question becomes, "What is Barack Obama's constituency?"

With revised healthcare legislation projections beginning to reveal staggering cost overruns contributing to long-term annual deficits in the trillions of dollars, and with "recovery summer" looking more and more like "relapse summer," it's legitimate to ask if those supporting Barack Obama's policies haven't been reduced to a coalition of special interests, including, especially, labor unions, Islamists, illegal aliens, and government employees.

In any case, it's clear by the way they respond to pollsters' questions that a significant majority of Americans are realizing that they no longer want to be considered members of the shrinking group that identifies itself as the President's "constituency."