Day: September 29, 2011
New Republican Senators Not Very Popular
3rd – or 1st, depending
Rank of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in popularity of new senators. Public Policy Polling ranked the top ten of the senators elected in 2010 and found the only two Democrats in positions number one (Joe Manchin, W.V. with a rating of +33) and two (Richard Blumenthal, Conn. at +18). Rubio was third, but first among Republicans, with an approval rating of +7, with Rand Paul (Ken.) near the bottom at -2, and Roy Blunt (Mo.) dead last at -9.
Most Americans Say Obama and Congress Doing a Bad Job
67%
Of Americans say President Obama and Congress are doing a poor job of dealing with the most important U.S. problems. In addition, 52% say the current president and Congress are doing a worse job of dealing with these problems than prior presidents and Congresses did.
Is You Enthused?
O, the endless stream of political pap
Is enough to make one feel completely sapped.
But while Republican fervor is rising,
The Democrats seem to be falling
Into the yawning maw of the Enthusiasm Gap.
Romney: ‘I Don’t Have a Political Career’
Why am I in it? It’s not the next step of my career, by the way. I don’t have a political career.
— Mitt Romney, in an appearance on Morning Joe, which led Jonathan Chait to note that it’s not for lack of trying.
Frum: Romney Has What It Takes to Win
Attention, Chris Christie fans. If you are looking for a Republican nominee who could actually do the job of president, who does not repel independent voters, who can survive a 90-minute debate without saying anything foolish, why the hell not Mitt Romney?
David Frum, writing in The Week.
Two People Hold the Keys to the GOP Primaries
At this moment of inflection, two people hold the keys to the GOP primaries. First, Sarah Palin: if she enters, Perry will have far more trouble on his right and Romney will become much more likely to enter Iowa to win… The second is Perry’s debate coach. If the governor of Texas cannot dramatically improve his performance in his next showdown with his GOP rivals, he may not even make it to Iowa.
— Mike Murphy, writing in Time Magazine.
Media Matters: What If Occupy Wall Street Was Sponsored by a Cable News Channel?
There’s been a lot of chatter about the difference in the “liberal” media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the rise of the tea party mobs in 2009 and its failure to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement today.
There are several reason for this, including the fact that tea partyists signaled that they were on the verge of violence from the outset. First, they put their propensity toward violence on display by showing up in a succession of congressional town halls where they indulged in fits of rage, supposedly over government spending, directed at their representatives. Then they began showing up armed outside venues for presidential events and other political gatherings fully armed.
“If it bleeds, it leads” in journalism. And the corporate media could not risk not being on the scene when some nutcase finally popped off and attacked a politician — except of course, there were no reporters around when that finally happened, to Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, in January 2011, nearly two years after the tea bagger summer.
Media Matters points to another reason Occupy Wall Street is not getting the same coverage as the tea baggers did early on — the tea party was sponsored indirectly by Fox News, which gave it virtually wall-to-wall coverage that first year:
