By Jeremy Lott on 6.15.09 @ 6:09AM
Democrats run against the past at their risk.
The latest USA Today/Gallup
poll is supposed to signal bad news for Republicans. In one
sense, that's true. Many of the answers do not contain much
comfort for GOP boosters. But in the more important sense, it's a
distraction.
The survey of just over 1,000 Americans at the end of last month
found, unsurprisingly, that they do not have a positive image of
Republicans. In a word association test, several poisonous words
and phrases attached themselves to the GOP like leeches.
Take a gander: unfavorable (25 percent); no direction (6
percent); cater to the rich (6 percent); close-minded or closed
to new ideas (3 percent); cater to big business (3 percent); and
poor economic conditions (3 percent). There were also ambiguous
associations: conservative (16 percent); George W. Bush (4
percent); and pro-military/pro-war (2 percent).
Only 7 percent of those polled first thought of "favorable,"
which shouldn't surprise anybody. There's been roughly a 10-point
swing in voter identification between 2004 and today in the
number of people who will call themselves Republicans. And of
Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents, only 58 percent
had anything approaching a positive view of the party.
That sounds awful. However, considering the unpopularity of the
Iraq War and the economic calamity that began while a Republican
president was still in office, the GOP has probably gotten off
light.
But the big headlines generated by the survey were about the
question of who people recognize as chief spokesman for the GOP.
Only 1 percent picked embattled Republican National Committee
Chairman Michael Steele. That tied him for sixth place.
The top four picks were Rush Limbaugh (13 percent), former vice
president and current point man in the terror debate Dick Cheney
(10 percent); the Party's most recent presidential nominee,
Senator John McCain (6 percent); and former Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich (6 percent). Only 5 percent of Democrats and
zero -- that's right, zero -- percent of Republicans (for an
average of 3 percent) said that George W. Bush speaks for the
GOP.
These results have been contrasted unfavorably with the results
for the Democrats -- 58 percent recognized President Obama with
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the runner up at 11 percent -- to
paint a picture of a party that is listless and old. Susan Page
wrote in USA Today that the "dominant faces of the
Republican Party" happen to be "all men, all white, all
conservative and all old enough to join AARP."
Democrats can gloat, but the results didn't tell us much that we
didn't already know and may work to paper over important truths
that they might want to to hear. People will use this USA
Today/Gallup poll to suggest that Obama speaks for Democrats
and more broadly for a large swath of Americans. On many issues,
that isn't so.
Another recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that
Americans were against closing down the detention center for the
prisoners formerly known as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay,
and the Democrat-controlled Senate, by a vote of 90 to 6, said
no.
Obama has run up record deficits and he wants to spend still more
on a "down payment" for larger health care restructuring.
However, Many Democrats in Congress are starting to balk at the
health care reform proposals. And a recent poll by the
conservative-leaning firm Rasmussen Reports found that nearly
half of Americans want to stop spending the remainder of the
stimulus funds, never mind new spending.
In fact, there is another way to read the USA
Today/Gallup results that should give great discomfort to
the Democrats. It is this: George W. Bush is gone forever from
the public stage and Republicans are no longer the issue.
topics:
Republican Party, Democratic Party
