Remember all those polls that showed (a) people disliked Obamacare, but (b) liked most of the actual provisions of Obamacare? Greg Sargent points out that we’re seeing evidence of the same dynamic today. A couple of recent polls show that people (a) dislike Obama’s handling of the economy, but (b) like most his actual proposals for fixing it:
All this suggests disapproval of Obama on the economy may be more a referendum on the actual state of the economy and the overall failure of government to fix it, and less a referendum on Obama’s current suggested policies. It also suggests that as President, Obama will continue to bear the brunt of public disapproval even if Republicans block job-creation ideas that the public thinks would help ease unemployment.
If you want to understand why Obama and his advisers are taking the American Jobs Act to the people, this is why. Despite public skepticism about the Recovery Act, they believe the individual ideas in his new jobs package have public support. Short of getting some of them passed, the only way to break the current dynamic — in which the GOP reaps political dividends from blocking policies Americans say they approve of — is to drive home to Americans who is preventing them from passing.
I don’t think there’s much question that this is right. People who aren’t pure partisans really do vote mostly based on the state of the economy, and they don’t seem to care much why the economy is bad. When times are tough, they throw the bums out. It doesn’t much matter if the bums have been trying hard.
But is it possible to overcome this dynamic if you barnstorm the country making it clear that your opposition has been working day and night to keep the economy in a ditch? The historical evidence doesn’t provide much hope on that score, but then again, I’m not sure an incumbent in recent memory has really tried very hard to make something like this stick. Certainly Obama hasn’t given it much of a go yet. But there’s still time before next November.
