As they point out in the article linked above, this is the lowest approval rating for how Congress is doing its job, in over a decade.... thats right, they are functioning even more poorly and getting less done than when the Republicans had the majority.
Is anyone really that surprised?
Instead of working to get anything done as the American people truly mandated them to do, they did exactly what they said they weren't going to do, filled their time with votes they knew would be vetoed and would not get signed into law, filled their commitees time with fruitless investigations meant to "emabarras" the president and haven't gotten anything actually accomplished, except to name a few postal offices and recreational parks.
Guess what?
People noticed and from the looks of things, not just the conservatives but the liberals have been watching and disapproving also....better yet, the independents that wanted to see real changes, needed changes, occur, have been severely disappointed with this lame congress.
Two days ago I showed that it isn't just Congress that are getting failing grades in the eyes of America as well as the world that is watching, but that Baghdad Reid has fallen to a 19% approval rating. (Via Rasmussen)
Hell, Dick Cheney is at 38% which is double Reid popularity now.
Nancy Pelosi's job performance has also been documented now and she is viewed less favorably than Newt Gingrich was when he led the GOP into the majority in 1994.
WASHINGTON — Fueled by disappointment at the pace of change since Democrats assumed the majority on Capitol Hill, public approval of Congress has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.
Just 27% of Americans now approve of the way Congress is doing its job, the poll found, down from 36% in January, when Democrats assumed control of the House and the Senate.
And 63% of Americans say that the new Democratic Congress is governing in a "business as usual" manner, rather than working to bring the fundamental change that party leaders promised after November's midterm election.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the first woman to hold that position, has also failed to impress many Americans. Only 36% approve of the way she is handling the job, the poll found.
In contrast, 46% of Americans in the current poll said they approved of the way Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia handled the job after he led the GOP into the majority in 1994.
The lies during their campaign with all the promises they made that they knew they had no way to keep are finally catching up with them and they have basically just started.
To understand how far they have fallen and that they are basically in a freefall at this point, the LA Times points this out:
A third of liberal Democrats, who constitute the party's base, approve of the job Congress is doing; 58% disapprove, the poll found.
That's a dramatic change from January, when a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that 43% of liberal Democrats approved of the job Congress was doing and 36% disapproved.
Heading Right states this perfectly:
If the Democrats hoped to keep their midterm momentum going for a blockbuster 2008 election cycle, the Los Angeles Times has a lot of bad news in its latest polling. Not only have the Democrats failed to keep their momentum, they have actually managed to become less popular than George Bush, at least in Congress.
Their problem in a nutshell is everything is not about Iraq even though they keep yelling as loud as they can that it is.
They were voted in to clean up a corrupt congress and yet they not only haven't cleaned it up, they have added to that corruption with their pork stuffed bills, Democratic politicians found with $90,000 in their freezer (William Jefferson), their public statements that have angered not only the military, but those that support the military, their friends and their families, their continued support for their own corrupt politicians and a number of other obvious reasons.
They can blame Iraq all they want, but until they understand that the people want to see some legislating being done instead of all these worthless investigations, the people want to see accountability for the earmarks instead of watching Pelosi and crew learn how to "hide" those earmarks better, and until they learn that you cannot work in a bipartisan manner when everything you propose is a highly PARTISAN proposal, their numbers will continue to drop and the public will continue to turn against them.
Their problem really is simple. They are so busy trying to keep their far far far liberal left (Example: Kos & Co.) voters happy, the ones that would NEVER vote Republican anyway, that they are alienating the moderate Democratic voters and all of the independents as well and those voters have a much better chance of flipping the Democrats off and heading a little farther to the right.
It is that simple and it looks like they just cannot see how simple it really is.
They are going to lose the majority of their supporters to keep a minority of their supporters happy because the minority have bigger mouths and can scream the loudest.
Hey, no biggie to me... I never gave the Democrats credit for having a functioning brain between them anyway and if they want to tell their supporters to "go to hell", who am I to try to stop them?
[Update] The New York Post has more on these and other poll numbers.
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