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Thursday, August 18, 2011
Boomer with Attitude Obama poll numbers low, GOP's & Tea Party's even lower
Posted By John Grooms on Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:32 AM
It’s funny — funny interesting, not funny ha-ha — what’s happening with politicians’ poll numbers. Pres. Obama’s approval ratings, currently at around 40 percent, get lower by the month, and his numbers related to how he’s dealing with the economy have dropped to a justly miserable 26 percent. Normally, this would be great news for Republicans, with the full-tilt election season just a few months away. So far, though, the GOP’s ratings, its presidential candidates, and particularly its Congress members, are doing even worse.
The economy keeps sputtering and failing to gain traction, but an extensive research poll by the New York Times and CBS, which went into great depth on details of how the public is feeling about politics (see the full document here) shows that voters still trust Obama to deal with the economy over congressional Republicans, 47 to 33 percent.
Normally, a president with low poll numbers would be trailing most potential GOP presidential contenders in hypothetical contests. But that would be in normal times, and this era, whatever else it is, cannot be called normal. As Talking Points Memo reports, polls last week showed Obama beating all the GOP contenders in swing states, where his poll numbers are actually going up. It looks as if the overall national mood, for once, resembles this writer’s view; namely, I am very disappointed in Obama’s record on the economy, on nearly every level imaginable, from coddling Wall St. criminals to giving away the farm in the debt ceiling talks. But, there is also no way on God’s green earth I would consider voting for any Republican currently running for the White House. Besides Jon Huntsman, who appears to have no chance at all, not one member of what my friend and colleague Hal Crowther calls the GOP’s sad collection of "scrambling midgets" deviates in any significant way from the rancid, ignorant Tea Party orthodoxy we saw displayed during the health care reform, er, debate.
It seems that large numbers of other Americans are reaching similar conclusions. If, for instance, there was any doubt left that the Tea Party’s support has crashed, that doubt was wiped out by the aforementioned NY Times/CBS research poll, . Read more details here, but the upshot is that at this point, the Tea Party is actually less popular in America than Muslims and atheists. Yes, that’s for real, and it’s not good news for the GOP, which has essentially handed over control of the party to its wingnuts. Here is one more result from the NYT/CBS research poll that should come as no shock to anyone who follows politics closely, but could be surprising to those relying on the mainstream media’s recent spin: Tea Party members, even compared to other white Republicans, have “a low regard” for immigrants and blacks, are overwhelmingly social conservatives, and want “to see religion play a prominent role in politics.” Thankfully, the same research also shows that Americans are generally appalled by those views. As long as the alternative to Obama remains the Tea Party, the "evil Kenyan socialist" will seem more palatable to most Americans, no matter how lousy a job he's done on the economy.
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