Washington - A Rassmushen poll recently published shows American President Barack Obama's approval rating has plummeted in recent weeks. This comes in spite of his well received acceptance speech this week upon being presented the distinguished Nobel Prize for Peace in Denmark.
Political analysts are at a loss to explain the President's recent slump in the polls, especially since it seems likely that a version of his much touted healthcare package is likely to receive approval in the House of Representatives shortly. Encouraging news on the economic front, in the form of slightly lower unemployment figures for November did little to raise the number of people approving of the President's performance either.
A political poll watchdog group, Statistics-R-Us, performed a sophisticated statistical regression analysis on Rassmushen's data and found surprising results. As our regular readers know, a regression analysis consists of using a diagonal variance-covariance matrix and applying non-parametric, weighted least-square techniques to establish homoscedasticity, as well as the more common parametric, ordinary least-squares regression to account for linear covariance. Questions of causality based on the observational data and problems of infinite dimensional functions can best be eliminated using these state-of-the-art regression techniques.
What this study found was clear. A full 27% of Americans polled by Rassmushen did not know the difference between Barack Obama and Tiger Woods. The data suggest that as more and more information on Tiger Woods' marital woes becomes public, the lower and lower the President's approval ratings plummet. For every sponsor that drops Woods as a spokesman, 2 % of those polled switch to Strongly Disapprove in Presidential Performance Polls.
Analysts are able to predict that the President's ratings will not improve until Tiger Woods has been away from the spotlight for a good while, probably after Tiger rejoins the PGA Golf Tour sometime late next year, and perhaps not until he wins a Grand-Slam event.
