In terms of job approval ratings, that is [emphasis added]:

President Barack Obama enters 2010 with one of the lowest approval ratings of any president heading into his second year, according to a new Gallup poll out Wednesday.

Fifty percent approve of how Obama has handled his job as president, the second lowest total since Gallup started polling. Obama beats only Ronald Reagan, who started 1982 with a 49 percent approval rating.

For weeks now I've been chuckling as I listen to conservative pundits go on and on about what a failure Obama is and how the country is turning on him, and that his presidency is a shambles, etc., etc. When in fact, Obama's first 12 months in office almost exactly mirror (ratings-wise) the first 12 White House months experienced by Ronald Reagan. Yes, the same Ronald Reagan who conservatives point to today as a towering Oval Office success; a man who was beloved by the masses.

And so rather than acknowledging that uncomfortable similarity between Reagan and Obama, fact-free commentators like Karl Rove claim Obama is the most unpopular, first-year president. Ever.

False. The truth is Obama and Reagan remain locked arm-in-arm.

UPDATED: I continue to be slightly puzzled by the media's on-going obsession with Obama's polling numbers and how he's only at 50 percent. (Big news!) The non-stop hand-wringing seems a bit odd considering that Obama's Oval Office predecessor served nearly his entire second term with an approval rating below 50 percent, and left the presidency with an almost incomprehensibly low 22 percent approval rating.

But today's Obama's at 50 percent, so that's big (bad!) news.

UPDATED: A bit more context about the Beltway media's Chicken Little-style reporting about Obama's 50 percent approval rating, which is uniformly deemed as being borderline disastrous. Guess what President Bush's approval rating was when he first entered office in 2001? Yep, almost exactly the same as Obama's rating today. But do you recall endless media hand-wringing about Bush's super-soft poll numbers back then?

Neither do I.