What Do, and Should, People Reasonably Expect?
Today’s WSJ has an article, by a pair of bipartisan professional, pollsters, about Obama’s slipping poll numbers.
A detailed examination of presidential popularity after 50 days on the job similarly demonstrates a substantial drop in presidential approval relative to other elected presidents in the 20th and 21st centuries. The reason for this decline most likely has to do with doubts about the administration’s policies and their impact on peoples’ lives.
Obama’s Poll Numbers Are Falling to Earth – WSJ.com. Bottom line, Obama is less popular — to a meaningful degree — but he is still pretty popular overall. The authors go through various issues in the article, and explain why they think Obama’s policy decisions on some of them are contributing to his decreased popularity.
Locally, here in New York, Governor Patterson’s ratings are atrocious, dropping from 51% to 26% approval since December. Next door, Governor Corzine is sinking like a stone also.
Meanwhile, none of this means the public is any more favorably inclined towards Republicans. As the same WSJ article notes:
Finally, what probably accounts for a good measure of the confidence and support the Obama administration has enjoyed is the fact that they are not Republicans. Virtually all Americans, more than eight in 10, blame Republicans for the current economic woes, and the only two leaders with lower approval ratings than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.
Overall, this troubles me. People are losing faith in everyone in the government overall. While I might be expected to applaud this as a conservative with libertarian leanings, I don’t think it is based on good judgment or reasoning. I sense that people are not losing faith in the ability of government to fix things and improve their lives; they are losing faith in specific people (almost everyone in office) to do the job. Some have sunk, some are sinking, and some — like President Obama — are just starting to lose their tailwinds. But I think the public, somehow, still believes if we just got the right people into office: people who were smarter, more honest, more selfless, or something, then all our problems could go away, or might not arise in the first place.
I get the sense that a very large segment of the population convinced themselves that everything bad that happened in the last 4-8 years is the fault of George Bush, and now they are amazed to discover that the nice, smart man they elected is more more able of magically making everything better than the scapegoat was.
This is our first big economic slowdown in more than 25 years. People seem to think we should be immune, but we are not. You should not have to believe that either Bush, Obama, or their appointees are completely corrupt or incompetent. Sometimes events overwhelm us. There is only so much the government can do to protect us and smooth out the bumps. That’s one reason I want to keep it small. I do not expect much from it. We will never eliminate asset bubbles. We will never eliminate fraud, greed, or overreaching. These things will happen. People will lose their jobs, take pay cuts, stay unemployed. We all have an obligation to help each other and to try to ameliorate the suffering of our neighbors, and to do the best for ourselves and out families. It is irrational, however, to expect government to do it all — to maintain a growing economy, avoid corruption, manage smart growth, and take care of us flawlessly when adversity hits. We’ve just gone 25 years without a major recession (the recession of the early 90s was extremely minor).
This one is bad. It hurts. It might hurt for a while. I don’t know if the worst is behind us or yet to come. People have already lost vast amounts. Jobs are gone, homes are foreclosed, and overall 18% of the country’s wealth is just gone. I’m not trying to minimize anyone’s pain or loss.
But we sill have it pretty good, and have had it quite good for a very long time. Neither party can keep the good times rolling forever without a setback. Neither party can avert or fix every natural disaster, every foreign crisis, every oil price increase.
Man up. Woman up. Just grow up. Take responsibility for yourselves, your family, your neighbors. If our leaders stink, by all means let’s throw the bums out, but let’s also have a realistic understanding of what any government is capable of.
