This was the week that Democrats cried and Republicans cackled.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey released this week was chock-full of bad news for the left. More people disapproved of President Obama’s job performance than approved of it. And the percentage of Americans who thought that the country was headed in the wrong direction topped 60 percent for the first time since the Bush years.

According to a Gallup poll released on Friday, the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as conservatives rose to 42 percent. As the report noted, “Should that figure hold for all of 2010, it would represent the highest annual percentage identifying as conservative in Gallup’s history of measuring ideology with this wording, dating to 1992.” For the record, the percentage identifying as liberals fell to 20 percent.

There are many factors contributing to these polls.

From the very beginning, the far right assailed this president with calumnious attacks. He was both a craven defender of the country and its borders and a crazed tax-and-spend liberal hell-bent on growing the government and destroying our democracy, one death panel at a time. It seems to have stuck.