The polls are interesting. President Obama still has a fairly high overall approval rating, at around 60 percent as of this writing, but his numbers are slipping when it comes to specifics. I’m reminded of Ronald Reagan’s poll numbers, which overall were high even as most people disagreed with his position on specific issues.
But pollsters aren’t stupid. They’re not going to ask questions that people aren’t equipped to answer. And they certainly can’t ask essay questions, which is a shame. I like essay questions, because I like to explain why I think the way I do.
So if I were asked who’s to blame for the lack of progress with the economy, jobs, health-care reform, and energy, I would want to say “Conservatives,” even though that probably wouldn’t be a choice.
I doubt if any question would be framed that way, though. It would probably be something simplistically stupid like, “Is President Obama doing a good job with the (insert one of the above)? And the choices of response would be “yes, no, or no opinion.” Dumb.
“Who’s to blame…” is a better question to ask — and the correct answer would indeed be “conservatives.” Why not Obama? Well because he has the right ideas, but he’s a little handcuffed by conservatives. So why not Republicans? Well, because conservatism isn’t the proprietary domain of the Republican party. It’s the %&#!* Blue-Dog Democrats who hold the key to the handcuffs, those so-called Democrats who represent conservative districts or states and have to promote themselves as “fiscal conservatives” in order to get elected.
Politics, we’re told, is the art of compromise — and that’s often true. But sometimes it isn’t. Obama made promises for sweeping change, and voters bought into that. Many new Democrats won seats on that platform, yet some of those may as well have run as Republicans. They are getting in the way of desperately needed change — and the have one unfortunate trait in common with their Republican colleagues: a terrible lack of foresight.
It’s easy to take a poll about the president. It’s much harder to create a poll that asks people to think. But you can’t think without information — and that’s what often slips through most people’s mental cracks.
Conservatives count on that.
Liberal Buzz 