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The year of bad feelings, and not just toward the GOP |
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By Byron York
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Posted: 06/15/07 06:47 PM [ET] |
You hear a lot about how the polls are awful for Republicans these days.
Don’t believe it. Just look at the new survey in which NBC News and The Wall Street Journal asked Americans about their impressions of a number of institutions and people.
A total of 28 percent of those polled said they had a very positive or somewhat positive impression of the Republican Party.
Now that might appear alarming, but what you probably didn’t see was that NBC and the Journal also asked Americans their impressions of Barry Bonds, and he scored just 10 percent on the very positive/somewhat positive question. So
Republicans are much more popular than a scandal-tainted baseball player.
Well, there’s an asterisk. A total of 49 percent of those polled said they had a very negative or somewhat negative impression of the GOP, against just 31 percent who were that negative about Bonds.
Anyway, as far as the big picture is concerned, it appears the public is pretty much down on everything.
Just 19 percent of those surveyed by NBC and the Journal believe the U.S. is headed in the right direction. That’s lower than the 22 percent who felt that way in April, the 25 percent who said that in March, and 28 percent who felt that way in January.
It has now been four and a half years since more than half the people believed the United States was headed in the right direction.
That was in December 2003, when Americans were buoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Before that, the right-direction number topped 50 percent in April 2003, when it appeared that the Iraq war had been a smashing success.
And before that, it topped 50 percent in the few months following Sept. 11.
And those are the only times during the presidency of George W. Bush that most Americans felt the country was on the right track.
We know that Bush’s presidency has been defined by Sept. 11 and the war on terror.
But looking at these numbers, it’s also clear that the American outlook on pretty much everything has been defined the same way.
That of course affects the president’s approval rating, which is all of 29 percent in the new poll.
But it’s also affecting the approval rating of Congress, which now stands at 23 percent.
That’s right: Bush 29 — Congress 23.
The 23 percent rating is one point below Congress’s rating in October 1994, just before Democrats lost the House and Senate in a historic landslide.
That was at the end of 40 years of Democratic rule of the House.
Now, we’re just a few months into the party’s control of Congress, and it appears people have had it with the new management.
Of course, they showed in November that they had had it with the old Republican management.
It’s a good thing there’s not an election next month, or nobody would win.
Of course, things might be even worse by November 2008. NBC and the Journal asked whether in the next election, “do you feel that your representative deserves to be re-elected, or do you think that it is time to give a new person a chance?”
Forty-eight percent said it’s time to give a new person a chance — slightly more than the 45 percent who said the same thing just before last November’s voting.
All in all, it’s a picture of grim public opinion. And there’s no reason to think it will get better any time soon.
York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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