While the narcissist-in-chief postures, preens and vacations, more and more Americans join the ranks of the impoverished

WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

Census figures for 2009—the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat's presidency—are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

It's unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase—from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent—would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.

"The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy and making sure there are enough jobs out there," Obama said Friday at a White House news conference. He stressed his commitment to helping the poor achieve middle-class status and said, "If we can grow the economy faster and create more jobs, then everybody is swept up into that virtuous cycle."

Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent.

Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.

Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government's role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

Obama is said to be disappointed with his vacation-rich job

While not specific to foreign policy, there is a mounting whispering campaign in Washington about the current President's disenchantment with the job he currently holds. "You hear it a lot from White House staff," says a Democrat lobbyist in the financial services sector, who worked on the Obama transition team. "The President is tired of dealing or bored with all the B.S., or that things haven't broken the way he wanted and it's not shaping up to be the job that he thought it was going to be. The way some of them talk they make the President sound like a recent college graduate unhappy with his first job stuck in the mailroom."

Most casualties in Afghan war have occurred on Obama's watch

CNSNews.com) – A majority of all combat-related U.S. casualties in the nine-year-long war in Afghanistan have occurred since President Barack Obama was inaugurated a little more than 17 months ago.

Between Jan. 20, 2009 and July 2, 2010, according to CNSNews.com's database of Afghanistan war casualties, U.S. military personnel suffered 452 combat-related deaths in Afghanistan. That amounts to more than half of the total of 900 combat-related fatalities suffered by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during the entire nine years of the war.

To see a month-by-month chart of U.S. combat casualties in Afghanistan since October 2001 click here.

There have also been 40 non-combat related U.S. casualties in Afghanistan since Obama's inauguration, bringing the total U.S. casualties in the country to 492 during Obama's presidency. Non-combat fatalities include soldiers who have drowned or died from vehicle or other accidents.

Each of the top five deadliest months of the war, accounting for both combat and non-combat deaths, have taken place during Obama's term. Those five months were:

1. June 2010 (59 casualties).
2. October 2009 (58 casualties).
3. August 2009 (51 deaths)
4. July 2009 (43 deaths)
5. September 2009 (37 deaths)