Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.
A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.
Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.
Reading these poll numbers, I'm struck by that famous question Ronald Reagan gave back in the 1980 campaign against President Carter, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" It is a question that is especially prevalent today. An overwhelming majority of Americans feel that this country is on the wrong track. They are against the Bush war in Iraq. They feel that the economy is heading into a recession. And they are especially unhappy with the direction this Bush administration has taken this country. I don't see how things can get any better for the Republican Party within the next six months, or even for the McCain campaign that is running as essentially a Bush third term.
The New Republic's Jon Cole has an interesting take on this poll:
If you think that the solutions to most of these problems necessarily invovle creating new government programs or strengthening existing ones--in other words, if you're a liberal like me--probably the most encouraging finding is the response to this question: "Would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" Forty-three percent say "bigger"--the exact same percentage that says "smaller." Not since since late 1991--when, apparently, the Times first began asking the question--did the public express such favorable attitudes towards government.
[....]
So what's the political lesson here? On the merits, the case for more aggressive regulation and a stronger safety net--not just in health care, but also banking, pensions, and other areas--has never been stronger. And the insecurity evident in this poll suggests people are becoming more open to these sorts of initiatives--more, certainly, than they have been in a long time.
After eight years of the Bush administration's deregulation and their philosophy of shoving "free market is better" philosophy down the American publics' throats, the American public may be waking up and realizing that this extremist Bush administration's philosophy does not work. The American public is starting to demand a greater social security net and government regulation to remove the corporate greed and excesses that have run rampant during the Bush era. There has to be a balance between government regulation to protect Americans from hardship, and to keep the system running fairly, verses the desire for competition and getting ahead. We've gotten far away from that balance, where the Bush administration is rewarding corporations excessive greed with perks and deregulation at the expense of the American taxpayer and Americans' ability to even compete or get ahead in this environment. If the U.S. economic situation continues to worsen, and even if the Iraq war continues to deteriorate, we may see even more Republican politicians losing their jobs this November.
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