Barack Obama continues to be popular, as confirmed by a new CBS poll. The story of the year is really the unusual amount of courage that the Senate Republicans are showing in the face of a popular president. Ordinarily, when you’ve got a president with approval ratings in the 60s, you would imagine that legislators representing states the President won—that’s Senators Burr, Martinez, Grassley, Voinovich, Lugar, Specter, Gregg, Collins, and Snowe—would be pretty eager to sign on for a few of his key priorities. And that’s not at all what we’ve seen.
It’ll be interesting to see how this winds up playing out. Obviously, I’m not inclined to share the kind of conservative values that these Senators have generally been pitting against the Obama agenda. But on another level, I admire what they’re doing. It seems to me that most legislators have an irrational overestimation of their own electoral vulnerability and, especially, of the extent to which individual congressional votes are likely to impact that vulnerability. But even as a maintain that view, I understand why members are reluctant to put it to the test. But now many Republicans are. We’ll see.
As for the headline “Poll: Obama Approval Hits New High – 66%” this seems to reflect a lot of the usual pathologies of reporting on public opinion. Broader metrics like the Gallup tracking poll and the Pollster.com average show Obama basically fluctuating around in the 60s since February. That CBS happens to have registered a higher result than past CBS samples have found is very possibly just a coincidence.
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