THE DESPISED CONGRESS.

THE DESPISED CONGRESS. A recent Gallup poll tells us that the approval rate for Congress is at its all-time low of 14 percent. The Congress gets low approval rates in general, but this figure is indeed a record.I girded my blogger loins and went out (in a cybersense) on two missions: To find out what various bloggers thought about this and to find out what the low approval rate means. Initially I thought that just one excursion would answer both questions. But I was wrong. It was easy to find the blogger opinions on these Gallup findings. To find what was behind the findings required an excavation at the Gallup website.The short answer to the question about blogger opinions on the Gallup findings is that the conservative bloggers think this shows how horribly Democrats perform when in power. They see hope for a big change in 2008. Many of them linked to this post by Roger Simon:

I never thought I'd say this, but the US Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid makes me yearn for the days of Dennis Hastert. And I gather the vast majority of my fellow citizens feel the same way since Congress' approval rating is at an all-time low of 14%! [You could get 14% approval for Attila.-ed. He gets 30%.]This should give a little pause to those Democratic Party triumphalists who think their crowd is going to waltz into the White House in '08. But that's the least of it. The more important question is why our government is run by such dimwitted mediocrities on both sides of the aisle. I have written before that Silvestre Reyes is the poster child of our Congress - a man who, as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee [sic], couldn't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. And he's still in office! Think about that, those of you who run businesses large and small. As CEO of Pajamas Media, if one of our editors were that uniformed at this point in history I would have no choice but to show him or her the door (not that any of our editors are even remotely that ignorant).

And what about the liberal blogger opinions? Mostly I found silence or a lot more focus on the low approval ratings of George Bush. That's about it for the opinion search. Now I will tell you what I found in my mission to learn why the approval rating has dropped.The Gallup poll that all those conservative blogs discuss is fully analyzed on the Gallup website. It doesn't seem to ask questions which would help me in understanding why the approval rate has fallen in the recent past, for fallen it has, from 19% in June 2006 to 14% in June 2007. Still, what the analysis shows is that almost all other institutions have a similar drop in their approval ratings. Even the military saw a four percent point drop in its approval during that same time period. This suggests that the falling approval rates of American institutions are linked in some sense, and that the individuals surveyed have a sour view on almost everything, not just the Congress. Two other articles on the Gallup site cast further light on the issue. One addresses a very similar recent poll on opinions and finds this:

Before the Democratic takeover earlier this year, congressional job approval ratings were much higher among Republicans than among independents or Democrats. After the Democrats assumed power, rank-and-file Democrats became more likely than independents or Republicans to approve of Congress. Democrats' ratings have gradually declined in the past few months, falling from 43% in April to 37% in May and to 29% this month. At the same time, Republicans' ratings have held fairly stable, in the mid-20% range. Independents' ratings have also declined over this period of time.

In short, it is the Democrats and the Independents who are less satisfied with the Congress now than in the past. The Republicans have not changed their approval ratings in the last few months. What is it that has caused this change among the first two groups? I didn't find a question on the reasons in this poll, either, but the second additional article on the Gallup website may tell us the reason:

The major increase in public dissatisfaction with the country from January 2000 to today may have been initially linked to concerns about the economy, but since 2005 it appears that Iraq has taken over as the primary driver of discontent. Other issues may still matter, however. Mentions of Iraq have been fairly flat in 2007, while mentions of immigration and fuel prices have edged upward, possibly explaining why ratings of Congress, Bush, and public satisfaction with the country have declined further since April.

This is all quite iffy. It would be nice if the next Gallup poll asked the survey respondents why they disapprove or approve of the Congress. But based on my excavations I suggest that it is the people who want to see the Iraq war end who are unhappy with the Congress which has not managed to end it. These are probably not people who will vote for the Republicans in 2008.

-- J. Goodrich