US healthcare: how has the bill affected Obama's poll ratings?

As Barack Obama was standing up to announce that passing the healthcare reform bill is what "change looks like", US pundits were already wondering what the effect will be on Obama's political reputation. There's no doubt the passage of the bill has been a bruising affair. As Michael Tomasky writes today : A record $3.47 billion was spent lobbying Congress last year. Not all of that was about health care, but a hefty chunk of it was, and the vast majority of it by corporations and associations that wanted to kill the bill outright or shape it to reflect their financial priorities. We wondered what the hard political impact has been. Rasmussen have been measuring both the President's approval ratings since his election and US citizens' attitudes towards the healthcare reform bill . This is how the figures compare. Download the data • DATA: download the full datasheet World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter