Bad news for Obama, albeit unsurprising. It turns out that Obama’s 47% approval rating is the lowest of any president, ever, at this point in a presidency.

President Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to 47 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.

Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and even Richard Nixon all had higher approval ratings 10-and-a-half months into their presidencies. Obama’s immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, had an approval rating of 86 percent, or 39 points higher than Obama at this stage. Bush’s support came shortly after he launched the war in Afghanistan in response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he doesn’t “put a lot of stock” in the survey by Gallup, which has conducted presidential approval polls since 1938, longer than any other organization.

“If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I’d visit my doctor,” Gibbs said in response to questions from Fox. “I’m sure a six-year-old with a Crayon could do something not unlike that. I don’t put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is daily Gallup trend. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it.”

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport responded: “Gibbs said that if Gallup were his EKG, he would visit his doctor. Well, I think the doctor might ask him what’s going on in his life that would cause his EKG to be fluctuating so much. There is, in fact, a lot going on at the moment — the health care bill, the jobs summit, the Copenhagen climate conference and Afghanistan.”

The new low comes as Obama struggles to overhaul the nation’s health care system and escalates America’s involvement in the Afghanistan war. He is also presiding over a deep and prolonged recession, with unemployment at 10 percent.

Obama promised a new era of change, and a lot of people bought into it. They ignored or didn’t know about his past voting patterns (present on everything), the fact that he’s done nothing to give him any kind of leadership or executive experience, where he stood on major issues (far, far to the left), who he associated with (terrorists and crooks), and on and on. The media covered for him and he got elected. He promised transparency, he promised bipartisanship. And a country sick of high school squabbling in DC bought it. He ran as a moderate Democrat who would be more fiscally responsible, help staunch our bleeding economy, and restore our standing in the world.

The problem is, they actually expected him to keep his word.

Obama doesn’t care about transparency. He doesn’t care about ethics or bipartisanship. He hasn’t been fiscally responsible, he’s done nothing but make the economy worse, he’s tripled our deficit, and he’s alienated many of our closest allies through his pitiful excuse for “smart” diplomacy. Unemployment has skyrocketed, he’s fumbling on the war in Afghanistan, he’s shoved through monumentally unpopular legislation, and he’s apparently just getting started. As if the stimulus and omnibus packages weren’t enough, now he wants to pass government run health care, cap and trade, and apparently coming next year: amnesty. It’s almost as if Obama is trying to make voters hate him. And no matter how much the biased media might try to cover for him, there’s no hiding what he’s doing to our country.

On the other end of the spectrum, it turns out that Americans are liking Sarah Palin more and more. In fact, Obama should be scared — she’s within one polling point of him.

Obama’s new Gallup Poll job approval number is 47%. Last month it was 53%.

Regular Ticket readers will recall how in this space in late November we pointed out that Obama’s closely watched job approval slide was coinciding with Palin’s little-noticed rise in favorability. And it appeared they might cross somewhere in the 40s.

Well, ex-Sen. Obama, meet ex-Gov. Palin.

The new CNN/Opinion Research Poll shows Palin now at 46% favorable, just one point below her fellow basketball fan.

When Sarah Palin first burst onto the political scene at the Republican National Convention, she was a breath of fresh air. She was a reformer who took on her own party and won. How many politicians can you honestly say that about? But liberals were threatened by her and so they went to work. They savaged her, they savaged her family, and they turned her into a caricature, an exaggeration, a joke. They thought that with their boy in office and their brutal treatment of her that she would be finished. When they realized they weren’t, the frivolous ethics complaints started — and it bogged her down so much she had to resign as governor of Alaska, giving the liberals even more ammo to attack her with. It didn’t matter that every complaint made against her had been overturned. The time and money she had to spend fighting them off wouldn’t let her devote herself to her job, so she did what she felt was best.

And then they thought she was finished.

Unfortunately for the liberals, Sarah Palin is still beloved by a lot of Americans, judging by the almost 3 million books she’s sold and the thousands upon thousands of people willing to wait outside for hours to see her. Her favorables have been rising while Obama’s have been dropping. Judging by these numbers, if the presidential election was held tomorrow, she could win. And if Obama keeps going the way he has been, the public is only going to dislike him more. This puts a huge dent into the arguments of Republicans who also have been trying to discredit Sarah or rule her out as a viable opponent.

Come 2012, it very well might be a slaughter by the Sarahcuda.