By KEVIN FRIEDL
Recent polling has turned up plenty of good news for the incoming administration, as majorities from both parties as well as independents say they approve of how Barack Obama has run the transition. Even Republican political insiders gave Obama's four biggest appointments passing grades in National Journal's newest Insiders poll. And public confidence in the president-elect has remained consistently high.
But if there's a bug in Obama's lemonade, it's that his staunchest supporters during the election -- liberals and Democrats -- are also the groups he's most at risk of turning off with centrist, pragmatic appointments and policies. According to Gallup tracking data taken before and after Obama rolled out his national security team, Democrats' confidence in Obama dropped 3 percentage points after he announced the nominations of Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of State and Robert Gates for Defense. That measure among liberals fell 7 points.
To be sure, neither bloc is in danger of bolting the Obama camp: Ninety-one percent of Democrats still expressed confidence in Obama after the announcements, as did 84 percent of liberals. But with some voices on the left becoming increasingly agitated by Obama's performance so far, the transition team will no doubt be keeping a wary eye on its left flank.
Interestingly, while Obama's time as president-elect has seen his support erode among liberals, it's come with no commensurate rise in confidence from conservatives or Republicans, who expressed confidence in him at 46 and 33 percent, respectively.
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