Consumer confidence is on the rise in the United States, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, as President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to the nation on Tuesday night to deliver a strong economic message sympathetic to a middle class that feels squeezed by stagnant wages at a time of record corporate profits.
The President is expected to make the argument for higher taxes on the wealthy, to propose ways to make college more affordable, to offer new steps on tackling the housing crisis and outline ways to help bring back domestic manufacturing and expand hiring.
With unemployment on the way down and good news from the U.S. automobile industry and the retail sector after a successful holiday season, the general public perception is that the overall U.S. economy is getting better, according to Gallup.
“This seems like good news for the nation’s businesses as well as for U.S. economic confidence in the week ending Jan. 22, improved from the prior week and the best since the week ending May 22, 2011,” Gallup concludes in its analysis.
Mitt Romney has climbed to a commanding 23-point lead over his nearest competitor among Republican registered voters nationally, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject.
Romney now has the support of 37 percent of Republicans nationwide, while Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich each have 14 percent and Ron Paul has 12 percent.
“History suggests that Romney is now the probable favorite to win the Republican nomination,” Gallup concludes. “Romney’s current 37 percent support is tied for the highest enjoyed by any Republican candidate in Gallup Daily tracking of Republican preferences so far this election cycle, and marks a 13-percentage-point increase in support from his five-day average that ended Jan. 2, just before the Iowa caucuses.”
As Romney’s support has increased, support for his primary competitors has dropped, according to Gallup.
More Americans trust President Barack Obama to influence the direction of the country than the Republicans in Congress. According to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, 46 percent of Americans say they want the president to have more influence over the direction the nation takes in the next year, while 42 percent said they would rather have the Republicans in Congress calling the shots.
U.S. preferences have been closely divided on this question since early 2011 after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. But President Obama has consistently had a slim advantage, suggesting a real lead for him, according to Gallup.
In general, Democrats want Obama to have more influence and Republicans want the Republicans in Congress to have more influence. Independents are more likely to prefer Obama.
You’ve got to admit, this country has gone weird. Maybe it’s always been so, but if a Massachusetts Mormon wins South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, you know something is not right with the world.
Most of the pundits are predicting that an uber-rich Mormon from Massachusetts is about to be the Republican nominee for president. According to the Irish odds-maker Paddy Power, the largest bookmakers in Europe, Mitt Romney is the odds on favorite to win the South Carolina Primary at 2-5. Newt Gingrich should take second at 7-2, while the odds on Rick Santorum stand at 11-2. It’s 25-1 for Ron Paul, 33-1 for Rick Perry and 100-1 for John Huntsman.
If Romney wins there, experts say it is going to be hard for his rivals to continue their presidential campaigns, to raise the money to go on and build a national infrastructure to take him on.
The same press release from the Paddy Power press office has Romney the 1-8 favorite to become the Republican nominee, but he only has a 6-4 chance of becoming president. The black guy from Hawaii, President Barack Obama, is favored 8-11. I’ll take that bet and throw in a 12-pack of Sweetwater Georgia Brown.
According to Gallup, Romney has finally broken the 30 percent barrier among Republicans. In the latest poll on the subject, Gallup reported that Romney has “finally surpassed 30 percent support among Republicans nationwide and is now their majority pick for the GOP candidate most likely to win the party’s 2012 presidential nomination.”
The percentage of Americans who identify themselves as independents politically went up in 2011 to 40 percent of the public, the highest percentage Gallup has measured since tracking the issue over the past 60 years.
But contrary to the image portrayed of the public in the mainstream media in the United States, more Americans still identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans. According to Gallup’s latest survey on the subject, 31 percent of Americans say they are Democrats while only 27 percent admit to being Republicans, perhaps because of the pathetic showing of the morons and dingbats making idiots out of themselves so far in the Republican Primary race for president.
Gallup records from 1951-1988 — based on face-to-face interviewing — indicate that the percentage of independents was generally in the low 30 percent range for much of the last half of the 20th century. In recent decades, Gallup has observed a pattern of increased independent identification in the year prior to a presidential election, and a decline in the presidential election year. The only exception to that was in 1992, when independent identification increased from 1991, perhaps the result of President Bush’s high approval ratings in 1991 and Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacy in 1992.
Democrats Maintain Party Edge
There was a two-point increase in independent identification from 2010 to 2011, from 38 to 40 percent. The increase in independent identification came at the expense of Republican identification, which dropped from 29 percent to 27 percent, while Democratic identification held steady at 31 percent. The net result of those changes is an increase in the Democrats’ advantage in party ID over Republicans, from two points to four points, according to Gallup.
The tea party Republican Congress will go down in history, alright – as the worst rated, the most unpopular Congress in history.
A new record-low 11 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest survey on the subject, the lowest single rating in Gallup’s history of asking the question since 1974. This earns Congress a 17 percent yearly average for 2011, the lowest annual congressional approval rating in polling history.
This discord in Washington caps off a year in which Congress fought bitterly before reaching a last-minute agreement to lift the debt ceiling, instructing a bipartisan supercommittee to cut more than $1 trillion from federal spending by the end of November. That objective was not reached, and the supercommittee ultimately announced that it could not reach an agreement, and disbanded. Also, this majority-Republican Congress will be known as the “Do Nothing Congress,” for opposing anything and everything President Barack Obama proposed to get the economy moving again.
It is now official. Georgia’s New Gingrich is the latest presidential candidate to rise to the top of the heap and then fall from Republican grace, leaving many Republicans wondering if they are ever going to get a credible nominee out of their bruising primary battle.
According to the latest Gallup surveys on the subject, Gingrich is in a 10-day free-fall from the front runner position in the Republican elephant race after enjoying a 15-point lead over Mitt Romney in early December. The race is now virtually tied, with 26 percent of Republican voters favoring Gingrich verses 24 percent for Romney.
“No other single candidate has benefited proportionately more from Gingrich’s 11-point decline over the past 10 days,” Gallup says. “Polling finds slight increases in support for the six remaining major candidates in the race, and to make matters worse for the Republicans, the percent favoring none of the candidates has gone up three points, from 14 to 17 percent.”
President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg
by Glynn Wilson
Bush’s illegal and ill-fated war in Iraq is finally over. All of the U.S. troops are coming home after eight long years.
It was the longest war in American history, although the news media is not covering the war’s end as much as it did the “Shock and Awe” campaign that started it all on March 20, 2003.
President Barack Obama marked the occasion in a low-key, solemn fashion, by saluting the troops upon their return at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but with “little fanfare,” according to the AP headline.
The wire service did report that Obama never tried to declare victory in this war, as Bush did with a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Although it is doubtful that story made the front page of many newspapers or the top 10 minutes of many local news broadcasts in this country. It is a war we wish would just go away quietly, and for good reasons. It was started under faulty pretenses based on bad intelligence about a non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction program on the part of Saddam Hussein.
“It was a war that (Obama) opposed from the start, inherited as president and is now bringing to a close, leaving behind an Iraq still struggling,” the wire service reported.
Exactly three weeks until the first Republican presidential nominating contest in Iowa, front-runners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have two different challenges, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Romney faces a challenge with the Republican primary electorate, trailing Gingrich nationally by 17 percentage points as nearly two-thirds of Republicans view him as either liberal or moderate.
Gingrich, meanwhile, faces a challenge with the general electorate, as half of all voters say they wouldn’t vote for him in November, and as he trails President Barack Obama by more than 10 percentage points in a hypothetical contest, while Romney’s trails the Democratic incumbent by 2 points.
“Romney has not caught on [with Republican voters],” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “And Gingrich is so deeply flawed.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
