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By Bob Beatty  |  Special to Gannett Kansas

As President Joe Biden approaches enters his fourth month in office, his average job approval rating sits at 54%.

From 1945 to 1981, new presidents enjoyed much better approval ratings in their first few months. Here’s their approval at the same point in their presidencies as Biden is right now: Truman, 87%; Eisenhower, 74%; Kennedy, 79%; Johnson, 80%; Nixon, 62%; Ford, 45% (though he was at 71% before he pardoned Nixon); Carter, 66%; and Reagan, 66%.

Heady numbers indeed.

Compared to those presidents, Biden’s approval doesn’t look very good. However, in the modern American political era, they’re actually pretty decent. Coinciding with the advent of talk radio (Rush Limbaugh began his syndicated political talk radio program in 1988) and cable TV attack shows, such as CNN’s “Crossfire,” American politics became more and more tribal, more and more polarized, and yes, more and more rude and nasty.

George H.W. Bush’s approval ratings at this point in 1989 were 56% and Bill Clinton’s only 48%. George W. Bush sat exactly where Biden is, at 54%. Barack Obama broke the trend a wee bit, sitting at 61% approval.

Donald Trump? Terrible. His 41% average approval after four months in office is the lowest of the 14 presidents since 1945. Trump approval ratings were also the steadiest of all the previous presidents. He never got above 46% approval and on his last day in office his average was 39%.

What does the public like about Biden? On many issues, he is a little above 50% approval, such as the economy, racial injustice, foreign policy, taxes and the environment.

But on the pandemic, Biden averages 64% approval, hitting over 70% in some individual polls. His constant pandemic focus and vaccination benchmarking, along with the popularity of the American Recovery Act, seems to have hit the mark…

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A Saudi failure to meet those demands should result in consequences, the senators wrote in a Wednesday letter to Biden that CNN has seen, “to include pending weapons sales, military cooperation, the provision of maintenance for war planes and spare parts, as well as U.S.-Saudi ties more broadly.”

“Immediate and decisive action must be taken to end the ongoing blockade of fuel imports that is exacerbating the growing humanitarian crisis,” sixteen Democratic senators wrote in a letter led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. “The United States has diplomatic and economic leverage to compel Saudi Arabia to end its callous blockade of Yemen and we must use it before more lives are needlessly lost.”

A CNN investigation in March found that Saudi warships were preventing oil tankers from docking at the key rebel controlled Hudaydah port, including 14 vessels that had gained approval from a United Nations clearance mechanism to berth.A handful of those tankers were given permission to dock at the port by Yemen’s internationally recognized government — which is backed by Saudi Arabia and its military — in a move that was praised by the US State Department. However, humanitarian agencies in Yemen told CNN last month that the fuel was nowhere near enough to deliver aid to millions of people in the country’s north.

‘Cruel and senseless’

The senators wrote that the block on the “importation of commercial fuel into northern Yemen needed by nearly two-thirds of the Yemeni population … has negatively impacted food transporters and processors, hospitals, schools, and businesses.”

A State Department spokesperson told CNN last month that “there is no blockade” of Hudaydah, saying that it “remains open and commercial imports of food and other commodities are moving through the port at normal or above average rates, along with goods imported…

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