Conservative nation: Gallup polling as of August 2009 showed "self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the Union," by statistically-significant margins in all states but three. Graphic from Gallup.com.
America is a fundamentally conservative nation, and the most un-conservative of American presidents has thus far not shifted America's conservatism so much as reinforced it. President Obama has run up against D.H. Lawrence's observation on "the essential American soul": "It has never yet melted."
At the six-month mark of Obama's presidency, the USA Today/Gallup poll ranked his job approval rating "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures."
By late July and early August, the average of all the current polling at Real Clear Politics showed Obama's job approval dipping into the 53rd percentile. Obama was down to his baseline of 53 per cent which had voted to make him president nine months earlier.
And it mostly gets worse from the job approval ratings. Disapproval of Obama on health-care hit 52 per cent in the August Quinnipiac poll, with 39 per cent approving.
Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" had become such an anathema by June that the Rasmussen poll found a plurality actually wanted the unspent provisions "canceled," 45-36 per cent. Only 34 per cent in the July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll were calling the stimulus a "good idea."
Even after several days of press enthusing over Obama's "wildly popular" cash-for-clunkers handout, 54 per cent opposed extending the program in an August Rasmussen poll, with just 33 per cent in support. The press was apparently using some alternate definition of "popular."
And 65 per cent opposed Obama's intended closure of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in the June USA Today/Gallup poll, with only 18 per cent accepting Obama's claim that Guantanamo "has weakened American national security."
So far in this "Age of Obama," the Gallup poll has registered an upswing in even the more controversial conservatism in America. In March, Americans placed economic growth ahead of "environmental protection," 51-42 per cent: a reversal from 42-49 per cent in 2008 and the worst showing for environmentalism in the quarter-century of Gallup polling on the question.
In April, Gallup recorded a new low in support for a handgun ban: 29 per cent. Which is half the 60 per cent that favoured the ban when Gallup began polling the question -- in the late 1950s.
In May, Gallup found pro-lifers outnumbering pro-choicers 51-45 per cent: a reversal from 44-50 per cent in '08 and "the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."
In June, Gallup's ideology survey showed conservatives unmoved, at 40 per cent "conservative" to 21 per cent "liberal." That breakdown was 40-19 per cent in 2004, when President Bush and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were re-elected.
Then a July Gallup poll made it explicit: Americans reported becoming more conservative in their politics, 39-18 per cent. The nation is actually more conservative in Obama's first year than it was in Bush's last.
Then there are the unforgiving tendencies of American democracy. In the century and a half since the Civil War, the party holding the presidency has lost seats in every mid-term Congressional election but three.
In the past four decades, the very longest any party has held the White House and both houses of Congress is four years. By election day in November of next year, Democrats will have controlled both houses of Congress for four years and the White House for two.
Congress' job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average recently went below 30 per cent. And the Rasmussen "who do you trust" survey which had Democrats leading Republicans on ten issues out of ten before the election, had been turned upside-down nine months later, with Republicans leading Democrats on eight issues out of ten.
So it's not the wildest guess that Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of November next year. Which doesn't necessarily mean they'll form majorities in one or both houses of Congress: the Democrat advantage in the 435-member House is 78 seats, and it typically takes more than a single election to dislodge so many incumbents. But Republicans should have a stronger hand after the midterms, and should be better able to tie Obama's hands in the second half of his presidency.
Obama and his Congress are up against a clock. They're unlikely to see such supermajorities past November of next year, and the closer to the fall of 2010 they come, the more fearful they'll have to be of pushing the trickier items on their agenda -- like legalizing 11 million illegal aliens while the unemployment rate is around 10 per cent and governments can't cover their liabilities as it is. Not to mention the unforeseeable events that distract and preoccupy a government, or blow it off its intended course altogether.
Polls are not static, of course, and neither are they elections. It's better to hold the power and lose the polls than vice-versa. But there has to be some significance in polling that's this soft, this soon.
Fraudulently campaigning on the likes of "a net spending cut," and proclaiming oneself the "change" when the system has crashed just a month and a half before election day, can go a long way to winning votes -- once. But it did nothing to alter the fact of America's conservatism. America is a fundamentally conservative nation that's got itself a radicalized leftist national government, and that discrepancy will have to be resolved somehow or other, sooner or later.
Andrew W. Smith, published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia
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