A just-released AP-Ipsos poll on public satisfaction with Congress has some intriguing findings, the most intriguing of which is that lawmakers are, beyond doubt, lagging well behind the public's demand for an end to the Iraq war.
The good news is that the public's general approval of the Democratic Congress has crept to 40 percent. Or perhaps "skyrocketed" is a more felicitous choice of words, given that last year a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll registered an abysmal 16 percent approval of the Republican Congress. So while it's true that Congress had virtually nowhere to go but up, the gain from 16 to 40 indicates something more than just general satisfaction with the change in name tags.
The House leadership claims that its movement on domestic legislation accounts for most of the uptick, citing bills passed, as the speaker did, "to make our economy fairer, to make our country safer, to make college more accessible [and] health care more affordable."
That's all well and good, but one hopes the leadership doesn't honestly believe the public could even begin to tell you what tax-garbled progress Congress made in making college more affordable -- I know I couldn't -- and is consequently doing handsprings over the good news. That's simply the stuff that self-congratulatory press releases are made of, winding up on page B16 of newspapers that no one reads anyway.
My utterly unscientific guess is that most of the uptick has come from launching those nasty investigations that those nice Republican Congressmen keep warning Democrats about in terms of overreach. Don't go there boys! There's danger! in them oversight hills.
However what the public genuinely cares about, what it's following when it bothers to follow Congress at all, is what lawmakers are doing (or not) to put an end to U.S. involvement in Iraq. And it's here that trouble is slowly being spelled for the Democratic majorities, for they appear to be positioning themselves way behind the eight ball.
"On the issue of Democratic handling of Iraq -- 40 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove." Those overall numbers are nearly tolerable, given the war's factious effects and the public's historical birthright of disdaining Congress, no matter what. Yet a closer examination reveals looming problems that can only loom worse, absent some radical change in Congressional direction.
"Support is lower among self-described political independents, who deserted Republicans in last fall's elections to give 57 percent of their votes to Democrats. Now, only 32 percent of them register approval of the job Congress is doing; 36 percent favor the way Democrats are handling Iraq.
"Even anti-war Democrats seem slow in warming to the new majority in Congress. While 59 percent of that group approve of the way their party is handling Iraq, 39 percent disapprove."
That four in 10 antiwar Democrats disapprove of their own majorities is bad enough, but that only one in three Independents is satisfied borders on the politically devastating. These are the formerly wooed and indispensable swing voters, and they're already swinging away in droves.
The troubling specter is not so much that Independents will flip Republican in 2008; it's that they'll simply give up in disgust over the ineffectual political process and stay home. Subtract their marginal vote, then subtract any statistically significant portion of increasingly dissatisfied antiwar Democrats, then add a motivated Republican base, and you've a formula for electoral disaster.
In sticking to their guns of a timetabled withdrawal, backed by a funding withdrawal, Congressional Democrats may not emerge in one triumphal, war-ending stroke. But they would at least achieve balance with overall public sentiment. Nevertheless they give every indication of folding. One wonders what poll -- what democratic expression of vexation -- the Democratic leadership is reading.