Yet we'll find most of the same clowns still there, in 2013:
Gallup said in new poll released Wednesday that a mere 10 percent of Americans approve of Congress’s job performance – a record low.
I've very little sympathy for such electoral whining; besides, the proper phrasing of the question should have been, Do you approve of the swinish, do-nothing malefactor you voted into office in 2010? After all, voters are relatively impotent when it comes to affecting political races next door. The uncharitableness of their choices begins at home -- and that's where the polling question should start, and stop.
Let's see a show of hands. How many believe the most irredeemable among the anti-government government-paycheck whores will be turned out of office in electoral disgrace? Joe Walsh, maybe. But the rest, the real barnburners and fire-eaters? They'll be back, because the selfsame whiners who now so vocally disapprove of the Congress that their elected representatives have given us will vote them right back in.
Of course we could see a huge swing in essentially conservative districts go to -- surprise! -- conservative Democrats, which occurred in something of a mammoth way in 2006 and 2008. But then we'd be forced to suffer the progressive cris de coeur about all those conservative Democrats voting like ... conservative Democrats.
I'd almost rather have the Joe Walshes.
That's exactly what I expect to happen when the House shifts back to the Democrats and I have been given much grief for pointing that out. Americans are fundamentally conservative. I don't have a problem with that depending on what you want to conserve. Still I hope the real progressives hang in there. They are , after all, the incubator for ideas and social programs that one day become the very things voters are anxious to conserve.
Posted by: Peter G | February 08, 2012 at 04:41 PM