President Obama and Democrats have won the debt ceiling messaging war, according to the new Washington Post ABC News poll.
President Obama heads into his second term with political momentum on his side, and leads congressional Republicans when it comes to dealing with the country’s debt limit according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
More Americans now approve of the way Obama is doing his job than at any point in the past three years, except for a fleeting spike upward after the killing of Osama bin Laden. The number seeing him as a “strong leader” is sharply higher, and a clear majority again sees him as empathetic with the problems they face. […]
Fully 55 percent say Obama is doing a good job overall, more than double the 24 percent saying so of the Republicans in Congress. Among political independents, 54 percent approve of the president’s job performance; just 21 percent give good ratings to congressional Republicans. (At 37 percent overall and 30 percent among independents, the Democrats in Congress do little better.)
The GOP congressional leadership also takes flak for a perceived unwillingness to work with Obama on important issues: 67 percent of all Americans see them as doing “too little” to compromise with the president. Far fewer, 48 percent, say so about Obama’s willingness to compromise with the GOP.
The percentage of Americans seeing the Republican leadership as overly intransigent is up 13 percentage points since December 2010, just after the GOP reclaimed control of the House of Representatives. The biggest increases since that time have been among Republicans and conservatives, with roughly 20-point jumps in blaming their party’s leaders for not doing enough to strike deals with the president. Half of all Republicans say the GOP leadership is not doing enough to compromise.
Here are the debt ceiling results from the poll in graph form:
More from Daily Kos:
And the numbers actually get worse than that for Republicans, because nearly one-third of the 36 percent who think the issues should be linked still do not favor default if spending cuts can’t be agreed to:
Q: (IF Tied to spending cuts) If Congress and the Obama administration do not agree on spending cuts, should the borrowing limit be raised anyway OR should the government default on its loans and/or shut down some of its operations? (Based on respondents saying borrowing limit should be “Tied to spending cuts”)
Default anyway: 63
Raise debt limit anyway: 29That means only about 1 in 4.5 Americans actually support following through on the GOP’s debt limit bluff. And that’s even before they’ve seen the disastrous consequences of what would happen. Those numbers would only get worse over time. Bottom line: If House Republicans followed through, they’d be kissing their own asses goodbye, from a political perspective. And if there’s one thing politicians hate to do, it’s kissing their own asses goodbye. In the end, they’ll cave.
AP:
Americans were angrier about last month’s horrific school shooting in Connecticut than they were about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.
That seems hard to believe, but when I think about my own emotions on both days, I was just as angry, enraged even. The difference was there was an enemy to strike back at in 9/11. There wasn’t at Newton, unless you consider the NRA your enemy (I do).