Greg Sargent flags some poll results from The New York Times that turn the ol’ conventional wisdom a bit on its head. My contribution will be to transform the ugly Sargent/Times tables (boo!) into an appealing chart (yay!). Unfortunately, I’m at the office where we have Excel* rather than at home where I can use Numbers, so the chart’s not actually going to be all that appealing:
As you can see, the public does crave bipartisanship. Bipartisanship from congressional Republicans who they want to see doing more to cooperate with the White House. In other words, more Arlen Specters and fewer Eric Cantors. To extrapolate a bill, more Charlie Crists and fewer Bobby Jindals. When you think about it, this really shouldn’t be so surprising. The American people got to choose recently between Obama and John McCain and they preferred Obama. They sent more Democrats to the House of Representatives and more Democrats to the United States Senate. Nobody likes partisanship, but few people like Republicans either these days.
* Were the people who wrote Excel’s chart-making code color-blind? They seem to have developed a program that’s superior to Numbers in many respects, but their charts are ugly ugly ugly. If I had a more serious job, I would prefer Excel despite its ugly charts, but for the blogger in your life get Numbers
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