Failed President Somehow Clings to 43% Support, With 49% Opposing

Per the media, 49% of the country must be animated by racism.

What else could explain their willingness to deem a failure a failure?

Of course I'd ask who is it who's animated by racial considerations? Refusing to admit that a Black President is a failure, despite his being a failure, is plainly animated by racial condescension.

You know what this means, don't you? Obama Interview on Sunday Night Football.

Ed Morrissey looks at more questions and analyses these worrisome bonersome trends.

Over at the Guardian, of all places, a guy named Harry J. Enten revisits the mythology that has grown out of the 1996 government shutdown and finds that most of what we think we know about it is wrong.

This jibes with my basic belief about the behavior of LIVs. Per the Conventional Wisdom, LIVs suddenly became intensely interested in Inside Baseball Partisan Squabbling and, uncharacteristic for them, formed very firm opinions as to who was right and who was wrong.

My gut instinct would usually be that LIVs do not become incensed by the things partisans do, but instead are swayed by very macro considerations like the economy and whether the networks are satisfying them with Quality Programming.

That's what Enten suggests, minus the part about TJ Hooker.

But even if the polling today did look like 1995-96, I would argue that this looming shutdown will offer nowhere such a clear win for Obama and the Democrats as it did for Clinton....

You would have expected Congress to see a steep decline in 1995-1996 because of the budget shutdown, but that simply didn't happen....

Clinton's approval rating just after the shutdowns was, if anything, slightly lower than before it. In other words, he really didn't win much in terms of his standing. He didn't gain ground in his approval rating, and didn't lose less than Congress.

Clinton's major increase in presidential approval occurred in the months after the shutdown. Those ratings corresponded very well with a major increase, also, in congressional approval. That's not surprising, given that both approval ratings tend to move in unison with one another. Congressional and presidential approval in this case moved up – because the economy was improving.

His thesis isn't that Bill Clinton didn't "win" the political battle. He says immediately that Clinton did win it.

His point is that "winning" this particular battle barely touched the polls. Like most Inside Baseball squabbles, the LIVs largely did not care. What they cared about was the economy.

posted by Ace at 12:27 PM

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