Two thirds of Americans, including a narrow majority of Republicans, see political motivations behind last year's firings of eight chief federal prosecutors. But the nation is deeply divided along partisan lines about whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales should lose his job over the scandal.
The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Gonzales faces a broadly critical public as well as congressional scrutiny about the firings of the U.S. attorneys.
In the poll, 67 percent said they believed the prosecutors were fired by the Justice Department for political reasons, not on the basis of their performance. About eight in 10 Democrats and two-thirds of independents said they saw political motivations behind the firings of the U.S. attorneys, an attitude shared by 53 percent of all Republicans surveyed.
Overall, nearly six in 10 Americans disapproved of the way Gonzales has handled the issue. Among Republicans, 47 percent expressed disapproval of how the Republican attorney general has handled the matter, with 35 percent approving and 18 percent having no opinion.
With widespread public skepticism about the firings and low approval of how the attorney general has handled the matter -- 24 percent approved in this poll -- 45 percent of Americans said the attorney general should lose his job over the issue. Fewer, 39 percent, said he should remain in place; 16 percent expressed no opinion.
Opinion was split along party lines: About six in 10 Democrats said he should lose his job over the issue, but a similar percentage of Republicans thought he should continue on in his position. Forty-six percent of independents said Gonzales should lose his job, 36 percent thought he should keep it and 19 percent were undecided.
This Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone April 12-15, 2007, among a random national sample of 1,141 adults. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
More details of this WaPost Poll can be found here.
There are a couple of interesting details to consider in this latest poll. First is the number showing 53 percent of Republicans believe the U.S. firings were politically motivated. The longer this news story on the attorney purges stays within the headlines of the press, the more this story convinces the American public just how politically corrupt this Bush administration has been. We now have a majority of Americans from all three political ideologies--the Democrats, the independents, and the Republicans--who believe that politics was the motivation behind the attorney purges. That is big.
Of course, it doesn't mean that the Republicans are enthusiastically calling for Gonzales' head. The WaPost reports that around "six in 10 Democrats said he should lose his job over the issue, but a similar percentage of Republicans thought he should continue on in his position." So a Gonzales firing is really split down the party lines here. Also interesting is an usually large percentage of respondents who registered "no opinion" on the questions regarding the way Gonzales handled the attorney firings (18 percent), on whether Gonzales should lose his job (16 percent), or even the 19 percent of independents who were undecided on whether Gonzales should lose his job. There is still a large segment of the American public who have not been exposed to enough information regarding the attorney purge to register an opinion on the issue. I don't know if the media has done its job in objectively reporting on the attorney purge, or if the scandal itself has gotten complicated to the point where it can't be summarized in a simple 30-second TV news broadcast.
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