What Americans think about "big government"

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Steve Benen, who writes the Political Animal blog for the Washington Monthly, pointed the other day to an opinion polling question that probably doesn't get asked enough in an impartial way---and certainly the results of this question rarely emerge from the black hole of corporate newsrooms. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asks this of its respondents:

“I’m going to read you two statements about the role of government, and I’d like to know which one comes closer to your point of view: ‘Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people’ or ‘government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.’”

If you click through to Benen's post you'll see the responses provided in this poll as graphed over time (1994 to the present). From the early Clinton years through 2007, the trend lines for both responses are clear, and track in opposite directions as you'd expect. I have no idea what might have happened starting in 2007 to ratfuck the trends, or why the stats today haven't reverted to their 2007 peaks (considering what the crash has done to employment and the safety net), but the basic reality is clear: a majority of Americans want government to do more to solve problems experienced by ordinary people.

I suppose the tangle of trend lines at the end of the record might make fodder for some informed speculation, but I'm just not feeling that well informed this pee em.

In my opinion, though, the significant datum here would seem to be the fact that we never hear a whisper by US corporate media (including NPR) about this curious fact that most Americans want the government to do more to solve the nation's problems.

All of us can have a good laugh about what Jon Stewart confronted Chris Wallace with on Fox News Sunday last weekend (i.e., that the Fox News Network is Lies, Inc.). But the "polite" corporate media are the most important perpetrators of misinformation about public affairs in the US. They do it by ignoring whole swathes of reality. I'll have some more examples in a few days because it's somewhat off-topic here.

(Incidentally, if you look at the Stewart clip at the second link in the previous graf, the apology he offers at the beginning was unnecessary: Politicfact "factfuct" him.)

Lemme ask you this:

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Why do the conglomerate media and national politicians of both parties keep pretending that the public is obsessed with the federal deficit when post-election polls show that only 4 percent of Americans consider it a priority?

That's up, by the way, from a total of 1 percent from the same CBS poll in January 2007---so I guess by that measure you could truthfully say that concern about the budget deficit has quadrupled in 3 years! (Also note from the screenshot in Krugman's post that citizen concern about illegal immigration has fallen by 2/3 from the level reported by the same CBS poll in January 2007, that is, from 6 percent to 2 percent!

Editor's note: "Lemme ask you this:" is a brand new copyrighted feature of this blog! It is sort of like the interrogative conjoined twin of "Wise sayings".

Knock knock Harry Reid

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Stories like this warm the cockles of my black heart, and that's not easy to do any more.

"If Harry Reid does not have the leadership skills to get 60 votes for cloture and give a Democratic president an up-or-down vote on health care, progressives will help defeat him in 2010, even if that means Republicans take that seat," said the head of one progressive organization...."

Believe me --- I'm in for $50 if muscular progressive groups like ActBlue and FireDogLake decide to put the electoral hit on Reid if he doesn't deliver (1) a Senate health reform bill with a real, robust public option and (2) 60 Democrat votes for cloture on any filibuster that Republicans might attempt on said bill.

Weeding out "Blue Dog" Democrats (i.e., crypto-Republicans) could feasibly be done with extreme prejudice by activist groups. Republicans have been doing the same thing for decades. The first Senate targets should be the offenders who have the most to lose, such as senior leaders and major committee chairs --- the glam jobs --- people who have attained the highest prestige, power, and visibility in life that they are capable of. There will never be a President Harry Reid, or a Chief Justice Max Baucus. They will never be bigger celebrities than they are right now, and they need to know that some human nobody in Chicago Heights with $50 to spare can help to take it all away from them forever in the next election. (Can there be anything more humiliating in this society than a loss of celebrity?)

Now, specifically, Harry Reid needs to know that there are a lot of people out here in the howling darkness* who aren't interested in his weasling promises about "something like" a public option. He needs to read the fucking opinion polls and take a long hard think about "where he wants to be in 5 years," as the old job interview question goes. Harry Reid is applying for a job in the Senate next year, just like sixty-something other people who are up for re-election or challenging an incumbent. America has no particular need for the talents of Harry Reid as Senate Supermajority Leader if he's not on board with the supermajority of Americans who want affordable universal health insurance. I bet our Land o' Lincoln homeboy Dick Durbin would be happy to ascend to Harry Reid's lofty station in life with a non-super majority ranging between 51 - 59 Senate Democrats. Unless he doesn't have the stomach for it. In which case, another impromptu mob of furious middle-American nobodies may raise the bet by $50 times a lot and help to put him out of the game, too.

If this Democrat supermajority prefers to shelter the predatory insurance industry from the will of three-quarters of the voters (and vice versa), then let them go do it in the private sector. There is room to purge nine of them, starting in 2010. Almost like Agatha Christie wrote the script: nine little Indians... and then there were none.
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*Editor's note: "howling darkness" was invented by Jean Shepherd.

WPE cafe blogging!

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I heart my new MBP and am taking a smidgen of time away from the Simple Country Editor grind to blog, just because I can now, in style.

A certain meme, documented in this case by Atrios, has been floating around since Our President has fallen into disfavor with a majority of die Volk. Specifically, the meme is that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president "in modern times." I wonder: why the qualification? Do we really know of any president who has been more unpopular? A more important question, in my opinion, is why it took a majority of the people 7 years to reach this opinion. Everything about Mr. Bush --- literally everything --- was apparent on its face since before his election, when I remember news reports of him standing at a Florida stock car track or something, repeatedly bleating "W" in high-school Spanish to a crowd of frothed-up Cuban exiles, with the learned media commentators asserting that this behavior displayed not only Governor Bush's fluency in a foreign language, but also his deep connections to the "Hispanic" community.

I believe there is one, and only one, reason why Mr. Bush's popularity ratings are so dismal: people are afraid that they can't afford all their great stuff any more.

Acronym alert: for the benefit of all you puny humans out there, WPE means "Worst President Ever."

So-called "stunning comeback"

I can barely stand to hear political news coverage by the state-controlled media. For one thing it mainly speaks for corporations and propertied Americans. For another thing, it guards the gates against facts that don't fit the daily military-industrial narrative. And for a third thing, it's wrong about all the important things.

It was disappointing to see my hero Josh Marshall fall into the trap of echoing conventional platitudes about Clinton's "riveting win." Here is a link to TPM reporter Greg Sargent quoting AP on the "major upset" as if that characterization is a fact rather than someone's opinion.

Let's look at the freakin' historical NH poll data from Pollster.com. I'm terrible parsing lots of numbers, eyeball-wise; maybe Big Otis can help sort out these numbers for me. But it looks to me as if Obama, in most polls, was trailing Clinton by a wide margin --- often double digits --- back in November 2007. His numbers started creeping up in December 2007, but he was still a bit behind in most polls. He was even tied with or behind Clinton in a number of polls as late as 2 January 2008.

In actual voting totals, Obama finished only three points behind Clinton, which is well within the margin of error for a properly conducted poll. Now I'm just a simple country editor, but it looks to me as if the real stories are these:

* Obama slowly and steadily closed the gap between him and Clinton in December, and finished in a statistical tie with her for the primary win.

* Something --- the euphoric impact of a real news event on the people polled, the polling organizations, and the mass media, maybe --- skewed multiple polling results between the caucuses and the primary crazily in Obama's favor.

* The entire media establishment (plus non-establishment guys like Josh Marshall) became deranged --- first by all the amped-up Obama buzz out of Iowa, then by all the bizarre Clinton buzz (negative and positive) after Iowa through NH.

I think the Clinton fall from grace and stunning comeback happened mainly in the minds of celebrity journalists and the people who shovel them press handouts. Yes, we may see that Clinton had a late surge in voter support, and there is in fact anecdotal evidence (too lazy to link to it) that some late support was voter reaction against the negative coverage of her after Iowa. Fine: so be it. But the final NH voting totals were right in line with how the polling there had been trending all along! At least that's the way it looks to my dyslexic eyebones.

So the big news, in my view, is that the establishment media and polling organizations completely misreported what was really happening in the run-up to NH. And now they are all covering each other's backs by pretending that some sort of miracle occurred for Ms Clinton. Can't let the rubes see behind the curtain. To me, this "comeback kid" narrative is even less plausible than the fairy tales Mike Huckabee is ridiculed for spinning.

I'll forgive Josh, though: he's a young guy, and overworked.

Late update: I hate Blogger's numbered list and bulleted list styles. They screw up all typography that comes after them. Therefore, my bulleted lists will employ manual asterisks in order to otherwise preserve typographic beauty and legibility.