Big Change

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Ruy Teixeira:

Poll after poll shows that the public has very positive feelings toward President Barack Obama and his plans for the country. And that includes the major new programs that he is proposing to bring change to a country that badly needs it. A stunning 71 percent of respondents in the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, for example, said that Obama has a mandate to “work for major new economic and social programs” rather than for small policy changes.

I have mixed feelings about reporting on these kind of findings. On the one hand, I don’t actually think that elected officials’ future has very much to do with the public’s opinion, such as it is, on this kind of question. I think, for example, that Obama’s re-election prospects will be based much more on whether or not living standards are increasing in 2012 than on whether or not the policies he pursued in 2009 matched up with at-the-time public opinion. So the politically smart thing to do is more-or-less ignore year-one opinion and just do things that you think will work out in the medium-term (of course the wise and moral thing to do is to also think about the long term) irregardless of the polls. But on the other hand, there’s lots of reason to believe that people’s beliefs about short-term public opinion do influence how they act so it’s important to spread the information around when it points in the right direction.