The nonsurprising factoid in the latest Rassmussen poll is that 57% Would Like to Replace Entire Congress. In addition to the headline two interesting trends are highlighted in the release.
First trend- Increasingly partisan approval ratings.
…the number of Democrats who would vote to keep the entire Congress has grown from 25% last fall to 43% today. In fact, a modest plurality of Democrats would now vote to keep the legislators. Last fall, a plurality of Democrats were ready to throw them all out…While Democrats have become more supportive of the legislators, voters not affiliated with either major party have moved in the opposite direction. Today, 70% of those not affiliated with either major party would vote to replace all of the elected politicians in the House and Senate.
According to Rassmussen Republican voters are disenchanted with congresspeople from their party, but this situation remains unchanged.
Second trend – An increasing mistrust of Congresspeople’s motivations and their true concern for constituents.
Just 14% give Congress good or excellent review for their overall performance, while only 16% believe it’s Very Likely that Congress will address the most important problems facing our nation. Seventy-five percent (75%) say members of Congress are more interested in their own careers than they are in helping people.
Ballooning deficit projections, the intransigence of Speaker Pelosi and others about health care reform’s public option, and the Democrats’ (such as Carol Shea-Porter) handling of the so-called town hall meetings have cost House members dearly:
…most voters say they understand the health care legislation better than Congress. Just 22% think the legislature has a good understanding of the issue. Three-out-of-four (74%) trust their own economic judgment more than Congress’.
For a democratic congressperson, increased partisanship combined with broad-based “throw the bums out” discontent has to be a nightmare. On the one hand, there’s the pressure to conform to the party line; on the other, there’s the risk of losing re-election. The few who represent “safe” seats can afford to back the President, but the remainder who support the public option will – at the least – have to prove to independent constituents that they understand the legislation and have solid reasons for backing it. Best guess is that most of them have a lot of work to do to convince voters to return them to Washington, and the ones who rode the anti-Bush wave (like Rep Shea-Porter) will be the most vulnerable.
Allahpundit is in a bit of a quandary as he reports on the seeming incongruity of columns by liberals such as Henry Rollins and EJ Dionne bringing up Mary Jo Kopechne and Chappaquiddick:
I’m not sure how the politics work here. My sense is as follows: The media’s allowed to mention Chappaquiddick in its obits of Teddy in the interest of completeness, but references should ideally be buried near the end of the piece under plenty of “health care was the cause of his life” pap. Kennedy is not, however, to be “attacked” by conservatives intent on reminding people that progressives’ newest secular saint left a woman to drown in his car, as this would be disrespectful to the dead (Teddy, that is, not Mary Jo).
Most of the time this is true, but maybe some liberals do have a moral compass.
Of course the post’s comments are all about Chappaquiddick, and some ask why Kennedy was continually re-elected. I was in my mid-teens and lived in Massachusetts when it happened. Sitting here 40 years later I don’t recall every detail of what people said, but there was a sense of shock. Lip services was paid to the idea of an inquest, but in the aftermath of his brothers’ assassinations Ted probably could have gotten away with almost anything. Things started to calm down and people’s attention spans were consumed elsewhere. When it came time to vote, typical reactions I remember include “shame about what happened to that girl” and “it’s between him and his maker” – and then the lever for Kennedy was pulled. After a few years it devolved into something humorous. A typical joke was “Hey did you hear the QE2 ran aground off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard? The divers found one of Ted Kennedy’s cars.” When the William Kennedy Smith/Palm Beach scandal broke, a famous joke was that Smith supposedly told the young woman in question “Better make love to me tonight or I’ll have my Uncle drive you home.”
And so a man who was probably guilty of manslaughter got away with it, at least in this world. Ted delivered, and we looked the other way in some sort of Faustian bargain, all the while telling jokes to relieve our troubled consciences.
*Update: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air reports that Ted himself used to make jokes about Chappaquiddick, and adds this sobering point:
If nothing else, it puts to rest the notion that Kennedy’s remorse balances out the undeniable cowardice of his actions at Chappaquiddick. Even allowing for the best possible spin on his actions that day, what kind of person jokes about an incident that left a young woman dead in the back of his own car?
None of these beautiful automobile failures were traded in as part of the Cash for Clunkers program. There’s something wonderful about people lovingly maintaining these monuments to faulty engineering, distasteful design, and poor quality assurance. Makes me wish we had held on to my mother’s 1972 Vega, even if the floorboards were rotting.
Cash for Clunkers was a poorly managed program that wasn’t well thought out, and it’s ridiculous that it was run by someone with no auto experience. Hot Air’s article titled Big winners in Cash for Clunkers: Toyota, Honda, and Nissan points out that foreign car makers gained share while American auto makers lost some market position.
This would be undesirable if those Hondas, Toyotas, and Nissans were manufactured offshore. However, according to the Japanese Automobile Manufacturer’s Association in 2007 (apparently the latest year for which data is available):
63% of Japanese-brand autos sold in the US were manufactured in the US.
424,000+ people were employed by Japanese auto makers in the US.
1.6 Million US-made “Japanese” vehicles were exported from the US.
If these numbers are to be believed, is it still valid to say there are foreign cars and American cars? A related question: are the supply chains of GM, Ford, and Chrysler located exclusively within the US? Are the parts makers exclusively based in the US? How many make parts for multiple auto brands?
The slump in auto buying impacted Honda and Toyota as well as GM and Chrysler, and if the metrics above are any indication US employees and suppliers of so-called Japanese car makers were feeling the squeeze as much as those of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. A significant portion of the cash for clunkers funds spent on Hondas, Toyotas, and Nissans will remain in the US.
The coverage of Ted Kennedy’s death is preventing the claims of Mohammed Jawad from getting wider media coverage in the US. Jawad states that he was sent to Guantanamo at the tender age of 12:
In December 2002, when he says he was only 12, he was arrested on suspicion of throwing a grenade into a Jeep carrying US special forces soldiers through Kabul, wounding two of them and an interpreter. He was taken first to an airbase north of Kabul, then to the US prison in Guantánamo Bay…
He has a bit of a credibility problem though – he claims his father died in the 1980s while fighting the Soviets, and the Pentagon claims that bone scans indicate he was 18 when arrested.
According to the article he’s a minor celebrity in Afghanistan, but he’ll have a hard time getting broad-based sympathy in the US. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 45% of Americans favor keeping Guantanamo open:
President Obama’s most loyal supporters — Democrats and liberals — do lean decisively toward closing the U.S. prison there. But Americans overall do not express such a clear preference, and in fact are more likely to prefer keeping the prison open.
Closing Gitmo would further alienate a broad segment of voters that Obama needs if he is to salvage his presidency. The groups that want to pressure the US to close it need to do a lot better than this obvious falsehood if they expect to change US public opinion and get President Obama to act.