I have several uber conservative friends, and these are good friends, not just acquaintances I tolerate at social functions. I saw some of them at a Christmas party this past weekend, and eventually the topic turns to politics. The wonderful truths I learned from these guys was: 1) the economy under George W. Bush was wonderfully glorious, the best boom period this country has ever seen; 2) President Obama is the worst and most unpopular president in the history of multi-cell organisms and he doesn’t want to even run for reelection because he he knows he is so bad; 3) Vice President Biden is the dumbest man ever to inhabit public office, Democrat or Republican; and 4) the nomination of Mitt Romney will doom the Republican Party to destruction, but the nomination of Newt Gingrich will result in a massive landslide… in favor of the Republican Party.
At some point during the evening, I made a remark about Republicans being wholly ignorant and stupid, and they disagreed!!!
Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say that everyone was entitled to their opinions but not to their own facts. Fox News and conservative radio have taken that axiom and disproved it. In the minds of Republicans like my friends, the above statements are true facts, unchallengeable or open to debate. I used to have wonderful debates with these friends on email over politics. Those debates are no longer possible, as I told them, as it is hard to argue with someone who thinks Bush’s Great Recession was a glorious boom period.
Anyway, it is usually after confrontations with the horribly ignorant that I despair for this country and the human race. And then I see polls that make me happy. CNN just released its latest public opinion survey with new approval numbers for President Obama. The numbers are 49% approval and 48% disapproval. This is almost identical to the numbers just released by a new ABC/Washington Post poll, that has President Obama at 49% approval vs. 47% disapproval.
“President Barack Obama’s approval rating appears to be fueled by dramatic gains among middle-income Americans,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “The data suggest that the debate over the payroll tax is helping Obama’s efforts to portray himself as the defender of the middle class.”
Obama’s gains have come at the expense of the Republicans in Congress and the GOP in general. By a 50% to 31% margin, people questioned say they have more confidence in the president than in congressional Republicans to handle the major issues facing the country. Obama held a much narrower 44% to 39% margin in March.
And the GOP’s overall favorable rating has dropped to six points, to 43%, since June, while the Democrats’ positive rating remained steady at 55%.
“The Democrats do particularly well among middle income Americans, while the Republicans win support only from the top end of the income scale,” adds Holland.
This finding was confirmed by ABC/Post, in which 50% of Americans said President Obama would be better for the middle class than the Republican party, and only 35% said Republicans cared about the middle class.
One very revealing thing one of my conservative friends said to me was that his top political priority was what was going to befit him personally and make his own personal wealth larger. This conservative friend is probably in the top 5% income wise, and he said he didn’t give a damn about the middle class or the poor. And I shot back: which is why, when Republicans like you are honest about what you want, you lose elections by large margins, because there are more of them than you.