From Gallup:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession. Relatively few name big labor as the greatest threat.

Historically, Americans have always been more concerned about big government than big business or big labor in response to this trend question dating back to 1965. Concerns about big business surged to a high of 38% in 2002, after the large-scale accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom. An all-time-high 65% of Americans named big government as the greatest threat in 1999 and 2000. Worries about big labor have declined significantly over the years, from a high of 29% in 1965 to the 8% to 11% range over the past decade and a half.

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From Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — Sixty-four percent of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of members of Congress as “low” or “very low,” tying the record “low”/”very low” rating Gallup has measured for any profession historically. Gallup has asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of numerous professions since 1976, including annually since 1990. Lobbyists also received a 64% low honesty and ethics rating in 2008.

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The latest Gallup poll pegs President Obama’s approval at a new low of 41 percent. That adds to the thought that the winner of the GOP presidential-primary sweepstakes is going to be the next president.

And inside that Republican contest, the policy pendulum is swinging toward pro-growth, flat-tax reform. A new agenda. With Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan and the announcement of a Steve Forbes-type flat tax from Gov. Rick Perry, the GOP flat-tax-reform competition is dominating the headline news.

While President Obama stumps for huge tax hikes — on incomes of $200,000 to the millionaire and billionaire level — and demoralizes businesses and entrepreneurs with his populist attacks on success and risk-taking, the GOP is fast coming up with a much better idea.

The handwriting is now on the wall. A huge part of the 2012 campaign will be pro-growth tax reform versus “fairness,” redistribution, and soak-the-rich. In a stalled-out economy, I’ll take the supply-side bet anytime. Pro-growth, flat-tax reform is going to win.

The stock market gets this. The flat tax is bullish. In late September, Herman Cain trumpeted his 9-9-9 flat-tax/fair-tax hybrid reform plan at the Orlando, Fla., debate. Since early October, stocks have come out of their funk, rising 12 percent.

Coincidence?

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We ignore most polls because most are not meaningfully instructive and, often, the phrasing of the questions hideously corrupts the results.  There are, however, some polls we do watch carefully because we believe they are instructive.  The Rasmussen “wrong direction, right direction” tracking poll is one we do watch carefully. It is conducted week after week and the single question that is asked (do you believe the country is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction?) is exquisitely unambiguous and the message it conveys to the ruling class can only be ignored at great peril.

Campaign strategists for President Obama as well as the leaders of both political parties, should be burning a lot of midnight oil pondering the reality that three quarters of the nation believes we are headed in the wrong direction.  That’s not just an opinion that’s being expressed.  It, rather, reflects a growing sinking feeling, a queasiness in the nation’s collective gut, not that things just aren’t going well, but that things are getting worse. It says that the vast majority of Americans believe the course that has been, and is being, set is the wrong course.

What should be particularly distressing to the White House is not only that the nation’s confidence is so low, but that it has also been deteriorating rather steadily.  To be sure, the people were unhappy with the direction of the country when President Bush left office.  When Bush departed Washington, two-thirds of the people felt we were headed in the wrong direction.  Now, following thirty-three months of President Obama’s initiatives to fundamentally transform America, three-quarters of the nation feels we are headed in the wrong direction.  The question doesn’t ask whether the people are happy with where we are, but, more importantly, whether they are happy with where we are headed.

Most polls provide a glimpse at where the electorate’s opinions are at a given moment, and, consequently, are subject to rapid change.  For example, prior to September 15^th 1950, most Americans probably would not have liked the way the war in Korea was going.  But between September 15 and September 19^th the enormously successful Inchon landing took place, and American opinion would have, no doubt, turned around on a dime.  President George H.W. Walker enjoyed very high approval ratings in January of 1991 following the successful Gulf War, but in spite of his personal popularity, his electability diminished as the economy declined in the months thereafter, clearing the way for President Clinton’s election in 1992.  Likewise, President Obama enjoyed a temporary, but well deserved bump in his approval rating when our navy seals took out Osama Bin Laden.

Presidential approval ratings (as compared to the “where we’re headed ratings“) are, we believe, less telling.

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The ultra-liberal Huffington Post blared that President Obama: “MOVING TO AVOID POLITICAL SUICIDE”; as the White House abandoned efforts to pass his American Jobs Act and went into a maximum defensive mode to save the President’s imploding re-election campaign following the loss of Anthony Weiner’s ultra-Democrat New York House seat and the launch of an inter-party rebellion to deny Obama the Democratic nomination for President.

The President took his best shot at trying to sell America his vision for new stimulus spending in last week’s joint- session of Congress speech the main-stream-media adoringly termed: “forceful yet plain-spoken message on jobs and the economy”. Hope for the bill’s passage wilted on Tuesday with front page article: “Support for Big Government Jobs Programs has Evaporated” simultaneously published in the conservative Big Government and the ultra-liberal Huffington Post. The story revealed a 50% opinion poll plunge in “likely voter” support for spending on job creation has doomed much of the bill.

Legislative losses can cause political damage to any Presidential Administration; but the stunning blow last night as voters in New York’s 9th Congressional District, formerly held by disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner, reversed a nearly 90-year tradition by electing a Republican has begun what Andrew Breitbart termed a “Civil War Against Obama”.

The first hint there might be a coup d’etat brewing against the President by the extremist wing of his party came ten days ago in an Op Ed by Mat Stoller: “What Democrats can do about Obama” published in the liberal “Salon” website.

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From National Journal’s Hotline:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has vaulted to the front of the field of Republican presidential candidates, according to the first Gallup poll conducted since Perry declared his candidacy earlier this month.

Perry now leads former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 25 to 14 percent. Last month, Perry ran a close second to Romney, trailing the erstwhile frontrunner by just two points despite the fact that Perry had yet to officially announce he would run.

Perry expands his lead to 12 points, 29 to 17 percent, when Gallup substituted the second choices of respondents who selected former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who have not ruled out bids but are considered unlikely to run.

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From National Journal’s Hotline:

A new Gallup/USA Today poll contains a counterintuitive finding: the age group most receptive to House Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s plan to deal with the budget – seniors.

The poll finds 48 percent of seniors (those 65 and over) support Ryan’s plan over President Obama’s plan, while 42 percent back the president.

That’s the highest total among the age groups tested – a 47 percent plurality between the ages of 50 and 64 backed Ryan, and a 45 percent plurality of those between 30-49 backed Ryan. But young voters overwhelmingly sided with Obama by a 23-point margin, 53 to 30 percent.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the differing unemployment statistics, and the consequences of long term unemployment benefits.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Gallup Finds U.S. Unemployment Rate at 10.0% in March
Coffee & Markets: Friday’s discussion of unemployment numbers
Jobs and Wages

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The assertion that the Tea Party is “racist” is not only unsupported by facts, it is also an assertion that is impossible to determine.  The simple application of reason — a shocking request to make for those too ideologically rigid to see straight — proves this out.

Even assuming the most liberal definition of the word “racist”, we must ask how an entire set of people can be proclaimed to be racist.  For starters, is there some percentage threshold that any group must cross to be branded “racist”?  The question itself is absurd, so we rightly dismiss it.  Likewise, if even a single African-American is supportive of or, God Forbid, a member of the Tea Party, does that negate the racism assertion?  Or does it brand that unfortunate soul an “Uncle Tom”? Again, the questions are absurd.

Tea Party opponents, and the MSM, have applied the Fallacy of Inductive Generalization to the movement.  That is:

1.     Sample S, which is too small, is taken from population T.

2.     Conclusion R is drawn about Population T based on A.

As we know, in any group, there will be some population of extremists.    Tea Party opponents simply cherry-pick a population of extremists from Tea Party gatherings, and fallaciously generalize the entire movement.

So rather than use the cherry-picked, unrepresentative, non-scientific samplings of Tea Party opponents, let’s look at proper sampling.  These are commonly called “polls”, which are no substitute for common sense, but do provide statistical support for it.

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t looks like President George W. Bush may have a pretty good birthday today. After all, this time last year the liberal media was terming him as “the worst president in American history.”

But a lot has changed since then.

History has proven that the challenges he faced during his presidency were much more daunting that anyone realized. In fact, shortly after the 2008 presidential election, Gallup ranked Bush’s popularity at only 27 percent and Obama’s at 70 percent.

Most of the country thought Obama would prove Bush totally incompetent, but since then a lot has happened, and Obama’s popularity, according to Gallup, has dropped 24 points to only 46 percent.

One of his lead generals has publicly criticized his handling of the war in Afghanistan and even former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove has equated the current administration’s handling of the BP disaster to of the BP disaster to what happened with Katrina. Some people have even suggested Obama’s handling of the BP disaster is much worse than the way the Bush administration handled Katrina. (more…)

Barack Obama’s public approval rating has dropped to as low as 47% in the last week, according to Gallup.  Although the President will not appear on the ballot again until 2012, how the public views his presidency will have a direct impact on each party’s performance in next year’s mid-term elections.

The party holding the White House has lost seats in 10 of the last 12 mid-terms, going back to President Kennedy’s 1962 losses.  Even in that year, with a 74% approval rating following the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s Democrats lost seats in the House.  Historically, the public uses mid-term elections to correct for the perceived excesses of the party in power, while the absence of coattail effects may result in some seats reverting back to the party with the natural advantage in the district.

IMPACT ON CONGRESSIONAL RACES.  The magnitude of the net losses suffered by the President’s party in Congress has been in direct, inverse proportion to the President’s public approval rating on Election Day.  The party in control of the White House suffered the most in 1966, 1974 and 1994 when the incumbent’s approval ratings were all under 50%.  High approval ratings of President Clinton in 1998 (66%) and President Bush in 2002 (63%) helped the governing party gain seats in those two years — a historical aberration.

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