Wednesday Links
- Drop the neocons: “Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional noninterventionist roots and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus.”
- John Samples on the national impact of this week’s elections: “The evidence suggests the Obama administration might be on the same path that led the Clinton presidency to the election of 1994. But there is an important difference: In 1994, the public had some faith in the alternative to Clinton and the Democrats in Congress.”
- Podcast: “Independents and the GOP Victories“
Americans Don’t Want It
“Americans are more likely today than in the recent past to believe that government is taking on too much responsibility for solving the nation’s problems and is over-regulating business,” according to a new Gallup Poll.
New Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, and 45% say there is too much government regulation of business. Both reflect the highest such readings in more than a decade.
Byron York of the Examiner notes:
The last time the number of people who believe government is doing too much hit 57 percent was in October 1994, shortly before voters threw Democrats out of power in both the House and Senate. It continued to rise after that, hitting 60 percent in December 1995, before settling down in the later Clinton and Bush years.
Also, the number of people who say there is too much government regulation of business and industry has reached its highest point since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.
That might give an ambitious administration pause. The independents who swung the elections in 2006 and 2008 clearly think things have gone too far. An administration as smart as Bill Clinton’s will take the hint and rein it in. Meanwhile, another recent poll, by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center, shows that
Americans decidedly oppose the government’s efforts to save struggling companies by taking ownership stakes even if failure of the businesses would cost jobs and harm the economy, a new poll shows.
The Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll of views on the Constitution found little support for the idea that the government had to save AIG, the world’s largest insurer, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the iconic American company General Motors last year because they were too big to fail.
Just 38 percent of Americans favor government intervention – with 60 percent opposed – to keep a company in business to prevent harm to the economy. The number in favor drops to a third when jobs would be lost, without greater damage to the economy.
Similarly strong views showed up over whether the president should have more power at the expense of Congress and the courts, if doing so would help the economy. Three-fourths of Americans said no, up from two-thirds last year.
“It really does ratify how much Americans are against the federal government taking over private industry,” said Paul J. Lavrakas, a research psychologist and AP consultant who analyzed the results of the survey.
Note that 71 percent of the respondents opposed government takeovers, with 50 percent strongly opposed, before the “benefits” of such takeovers were presented.
President Obama is an eloquent spokesman for his agenda, and he has an excellent political team with a lot of outside allies to push it. But as the old advertising joke goes, you can have the best research and the best design and the best advertising for your dog food, but it won’t sell if the dogs don’t like it.
Obama’s New Numbers
A new ABC/Washington Post poll is out. The trends are not comforting for the White House. President Obama’s approval rating – probably the most important number for a president these days – continues to drop. Approval by independents has fallen by 9 points over his term. Support for his handling of the economy now garners the approval of barely half of respondents. The number of people who see him as an “old-style tax and spend” Democrat has risen by 11 percentage points; the number who see him as a new Democrat “careful with public money” has dropped by about the same number.
A majority of the public now rejects a second spending splurge. Most now give avoiding deficits a higher priority than increasing spending, even to fight the recession.
The number of people in the poll identifying themselves as independents is at a post-1981 high. Most of those people may well vote most of the time for one of the major parties. For now, neither party is attracting much loyalty.
Surely some Democrats in Congress must be starting to wonder how far they should follow the president and his desire for ever greater spending.
Trouble in Obamaland
The Washington Post reports on a recent survey:
The poll found little change in underlying public attitudes toward government since the inauguration, with slightly more than half saying they prefer a smaller government with fewer services to a larger government with more services. Independents, however, now split 61 to 35 percent in favor of a smaller government; they were more narrowly divided on this question a year ago (52 to 44 percent), before the financial crisis hit.
The Obama team probably assumes people who identify as Republicans will disapprove of Obama’s actions sooner rather than later. Independents, however, are crucial to keeping up his public approval and thereby getting what he wants out of Congress. On the size of government — as well as on many specific policy issues — Obama is now running counter to public opinion.
This may be the beginning of the end of the beginning.
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