So says the National Journal. And I guess we’re going to have to take their word for it, since the actual poll isn’t linked in the piece:
Despite deepening doubts about President Obama’s economic agenda, Americans generally prefer the proposals he offered last week for reviving the economy to the competing ideas advanced by congressional Republicans and the GOP’s 2012 presidential field, a United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll has found.
The poll suggests Americans remain unconvinced that either party’s agenda can significantly dent the nation’s longest period of sustained unemployment since the Depression. The share of Americans who said that Obama’s policies have compounded economic difficulties was nearly double the portion who said he has improved conditions. And just one-in-six said they expected the jobs plan he sent to Congress will significantly reduce unemployment.
Yet, nearly half of those surveyed thought his plan would help somewhat, and the president still held a 37 percent to 35 percent advantage over congressional Republicans when respondents were asked whom they trusted more to revive the economy.
The Congressional Connection Poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, interviewed 1,010 adults by landline and cell phone Sept. 8-11 for most of the questions in the survey; those questions have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
[…]
With some exceptions, those polled saw more promise in the ideas that Obama offered in his speech than proposals Republicans are touting in Congress and in the 2012 campaign. The survey specifically identified the alternatives as proposals from the GOP or President Obama.
[…]
Ideas Obama touted in last week’s speech generally fared better. Three-fourths of those polled said they believed his proposal to cut taxes on employers who hire new workers, or provide a raise to existing ones, would be either very or somewhat effective in creating jobs. Seven-in-10 said the same about his proposal to provide state and local governments funds to prevent layoffs of teachers and police officers. Two-thirds rendered the same verdict on the idea of helping more homeowners refinance their mortgages at lower interest rates.
The element of Obama’s plan that costs the most, and is most likely to attract support from congressional Republicans, actually polled the weakest: cutting the Social Security payroll taxes paid by workers and employers. Just 42 percent of those surveyed believed that would be even somewhat effective, while 52 percent thought it would have little or no effect.
[…]
More familiar divides resurfaced in assessments of Obama’s record and his new plan. Overall, about one-fifth of those surveyed said Obama’s economic policies since taking office had improved the economy; nearly two-fifths said he had made the economy worse, while the rest said his policies have had no effect. That is Obama’s worst showing since taking office, when compared with earlier findings on the same question from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Reactions on that question showed a sharp racial divide: though weak itself, the share of minorities who thought Obama’s agenda had improved the economy (29 percent) still exceeded the portion who thought he had weakened it (18 percent). But among whites, fully 48 percent thought his actions had hurt the economy-nearly triple the 17 percent who believed he had improved it. College-educated whites, who have generally been more positive toward Obama, were as negative on this judgment as whites without a college degree, his toughest audience throughout his presidency.
All of these results underscore how much Obama’s hopes next year may turn on convincing voters to see the 2012 election as a forward-looking choice between competing vision rather than a referendum on his results since 2009.
[my emphasis]
That is, Obama’s re-election chances ride on promising more of the same, while convincing people you are offering something different — and more importantly, something that will help them.
Divide, pander, conquer.
Now, I’m no professional pollster or news writer. But were it me, instead of suggesting that the takeaway from this poll is that Americans are more predisposed to follow Obama’s lead — more proposed spending, higher taxes, and more laundered money moving from the government to union leadership and then back to the government in the form of both dues and taxes — I may have struck upon the fact that 40% of those polled felt Obama’s policies had hurt the economy, while only 20% believe they’ve helped, Obama’s worst showing ever on that question.
— Though I do agree that I’m troubled by the high percentages polled who believe that giving yet more money to teachers unions, providing more mortgage bailouts, and funding an extension of unemployment benefits — with more money taken from the private sector and small businesses in the form of higher taxes — is somehow a recipe for job growth.
Honestly: every time it looks like Americans are waking up, some poll shows up to suggest that they still don’t understand the workings of the economy in which they live.
The highest-polling proposals — which Americans haven’t even been able to read as of yet — are all feel-good pablum, be it “support our teachers and firefighters!” or “give companies a tax credit if they give employees a raise!”. No word on where that money is going to come from, or why it is being distributed in such a way.
It would be depressing were it not so surreal.
If his ideas are so popular, why didn’t he get a bump in the polls after Thursday’s historic address?
I’ll tell you why.
Damn racists.
College students are being taught the free unicorn theory of economics these days. Not surprisingly, they have a inimical working relationship with reality.
Here’s all I want to know about the 2012 election: Will Obama pay my mortgage and the gas in my car from his Obama-stash? Coz if he will, I’m so there.
Link
Ann Coulter loves her some Mitt Romney.
Who cares were the money’s coming from, or how they’e going to spend it, so long as it supports noble and selfless public servants. You just hate teachers and firefighters.
On account of because you’re an ignorant firebug.
Now that the government-creates-jobs meme has been so thoroughly installed in moron nation like that giant slug in Chekov’s ear, that would be the same utterly corrupt monetary puppet masters who ruined it, of course, together with their bitches in DC.
Trust those fuckers. We’ll have to because not a soul is doing a damn thing to remove them, and in fact, last night showed us that losing-slightly-more-slowly is alive and well. So, stay that course!
It would be depressing were it not so surreal.
Our local politicians here in CA are already spending the $130B going to
save the jobs of teacher and fire-fighterspay college tuition for illegal aliens and teach GLBT? history in second grade. Now get back to work you cracker SOBs.It would be depressing were it not so surreal.
well, that’s the intention of the piece. No one I know feels that way. Most everyone – from employees to strangers I meet at the grocery store – seem to think we need to somehow keep it together until we can get him out off office.
Disaster.
He’s got the smattering of supporters here and there, highly concentrated among the media – but even they are beginning to crack.
Not just a new poll but a new, new poll.
I’m not going to trust analysis or conclusions from anybody who can write “…the president still held a 37 percent to 35 percent advantage over congressional Republicans…” and in the next paragraph note the margin of error is 4.1%. But what do you expect from a guy named Brownstain?
To be replaced by another tool for the machine, this time with the nice trailing R.
In the position he occupies Barry has enough latitude to go well to the left of center and that’s just what he’s done. But he does so in precisely the same ways that Bush before him did whatever he did. Neither have done a damn thing except yell bunnies! while the international puppeteers quietly but entirely have their way with the place, starting with the money.
And what better way to keep the spice flowing than to break first Bush’s national social government veto pen and then America’s back with the little Marxist tool currently installed. It’s all about growing the Machine and the machine needs money, billions a day of it.
Not so much as a question was formed last night going to the root of why America is no longer America. That part; that part’s off the table where it shall most definitely stay. The only guy who has any at least passing interest in it is a shrill cranky old man who’s best function for the boys at the top is for his odd foreign policy platform to build another dose of unelectability that splits the rightwing vote.
Nice game they’ve cooked up there. It’s so warped things that those things have all become addicts to their machinations, and the Press, its willing, craven whore.
This is what power does, America. How many times do you have to be told to wake up … typically after which you instinctively chase back to the teevee for another episode of Idol.
Jesus wept.
I supposed it’s merely a coincidence that the graphics used in the article linked by geoffb are indistinguishable from the ubiquitous Obama campaign logo. They’re not even trying to hide it any more.
[…] Jeff Goldstein: Americans are rational ignoramuses That is, Obama’s re-election chances ride on promising more of the same, while convincing people […]
Your pessimism depresses me JHoward.
It’s kinda like when I find myself debating a lib who then uses as their argument that Bush did the same thing. As if I supported his spending,etc.
Seriously, when the options given are A) Help a lot, B) Help a little, and C) Not help at all, the B) answers aren’t worth a goddamn thing. That’s the wishy-washy middle answer that the nice churchmice give you because they don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. It’s the polling equivalent of a Little League game where nobody keeps score. Yet Brownstain foregrounds it as “Yet, nearly half of those surveyed thought his plan would help somewhat…” as though it meant something. If these clowns were honest and/or intelligent, they’d have ordered their little list by “Very Effective” percentages, which is what really matters. But that would have fucked up the spin, so let’s just baffle ’em with bullshit.
And is it really instructive that they found more support for “Let’s give kitties and puppies to children” than they found for “Bush’s evil plan to lower taxes on his fellow rich bastards?”
I’ve warned you all that the Presidential race will only break your heart and piss you off. Concentrate on your local races, where you can have more impact with less heartburn.
Do it right, and whichever of these yahoos winds up in the Oval Office will spend most of their time dealing with a Congress that pulls funding for half the Cabinet, and 40 Governors who refuse to follow federal mandates. It’ll serve him (or her) right.
Breaking news. Corporation with large government contracts responses poll showing Americans want more government spending on contracts.
Damn spell check and my clumsy fingers, responses was sponsors.
These guys own Otis? I take back everything I said before. Given that the Otis guys are the only fully-employed, job-secure tradesmen working in America’s downtowns, I figure I’ll be sending a resume their way real soon.
Yay, United Technologies! You guys are teh bestest!
Though I do agree that I’m troubled by the high percentages polled who believe that giving yet more money to teachers unions, providing more mortgage bailouts, and funding an extension of unemployment benefits — with more money taken from the private sector and small businesses in the form of higher taxes — is a somehow a recipe for job growth.
The leftist goal is to continue expanding those groups dependent on government largesse until they are powerless to do anything but support taking money from the productive and give it to them. Obama knows the private sector is better-suited to job creation, but allowing the private sector the freedom of movement to create jobs would denigrate the power of government to parcel out cash to favored groups. I used to give the man enough credit just by chalking it up to leftish stupidity, but I’ve come to the realization that it is by design.
Go Clipper Squid. There’s the future.
Carin, these radically-right candidates crawl over themselves to reassure the masses and “debate” how to save naturally bankrupt national constitutionally-unauthorized social programs while funding for those programs involves printing even more trillions in false money and while that printing leverages the top against the middle and the middle against the bottom.
DC is nothing if it is not a fraudulent bank.
The whole literally God-damned mess is leveraged out over an abyss. It’s utterly false and artificial. We bleed into it a little every day and we need to know that.
In the end — which, unless we get damn real damn fast approaches at a speed that makes us all dependents in twenty years — the only way out is to dig oneself out of the inevitable rubble. Which until it comes our fellow man cannot find in himself the character to so much as visualize, preferring to fall into yet more complacency, adopt yet more progressive myth, live an even more shelved, artificial existence, and serve the Machine so as to take the Money.
It’s all in the cards. We’ve no will to be free yet, ironically, we may be free again by way of somehow surviving this thing that comes. It’s not depressing when you realize that these shabby, ersatz values we’ve created are an illusion, an illusion that replaces real personal, spiritual liberty with the worst denials, cheats, and lies in human nature and calls it progress.
But only for as long as they can be propped up, which isn’t much longer. If there’s a way out is starts and ends with being unflinchingly, unerringly honest about things and one another and how both really function. The bullshit has to end because it’s the bullshit that’s suffocating us and our structural liberties.