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Pelosi's right: Her unpopularity doesn't matter
By: Matthew Sheffield
Managing Editor
07/27/09 3:30 PM EDT
The GOP's long-term strategy of making House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a regular target of criticism seems to be paying off although not necessarily in electoral terms.
That conclusion is tough to escape after reading Glenn Thrush's impromptu interview with the liberal San Franciscan where he asked her about her persistently low personal approval ratings. The short confrontation seems to have caused some pent-up feelings to bubble to the surface. Instead of brushing off the reporter, Pelosi stopped and insisted that she's still trusted by the public:
“No, I don’t care,” Pelosi told POLITICO last Thursday, laughing heartily as she walked beneath the Capitol dome and plunged into a crowd of tourists.
Last week’s Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO poll brought grim news for Pelosi, revealing that only a quarter of Americans trust the San Francisco Democrat — putting her in the basement with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).
Mention of the “trust” question halted the click-clack of Pelosi’s heels against Rotunda marble, and she turned to face the reporter who posed the question.
“I don’t know about ‘trust’ — I think I’m trusted,” she said.
“I certainly want to be trusted. I’m not particularly concerned if I’m liked.”
The trouble for Pelosi, however, is that trust and approval are inextricably linked in most people's minds. In a Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month, just 5 percent of respondents said they had a "very positive" opinion of the speaker in contrast to 34 percent who said they had a "very negative" opinion of her.
Asked the more generic question of whether they "approve" of the job Pelosi is doing (a question less about personality), 38 percent of respondents to an ABC News poll last month said they approved.
Those numbers are simply more of the same for the speaker. Even polls conducted on behalf of the liberal blog Daily Kos have never shown her earning more than 43 percent approval the entirety of 2009. The most recent poll has her at 33 percent. Her negative ratings have outnumbered her positives since 2008 according to Wall Street Journal polling.
Undoubtedly, Republicans have contributed to driving Pelosi's numbers down. After all, they've been at it since 2006.
That fact itself is interesting, however. During the 3 years that the GOP has spent attacking Nancy Pelosi, they've lost seats in both houses in '06 and '08, in addition to losing the presidency. That would seem to suggest, at least to me, that making Nancy Pelosi the focal point for rhetorical attacks simply doesn't work.
It will certainly help with fund-raising and rallying the base, but attacking the speaker is not effective at persuading people outside the Republican base, largely because, as divisive of a figure as she is, Pelosi simply isn't that visible. A full 19 percent of respondents to a mid-July Gallup poll had either not heard of her or were uncertain what to think of her.
That isn't a very good platform to build a national movement on. I'd bet that even if Pelosi's unknown/no opinion numbers came down and her negatives continued to go up, it still wouldn't mean much of anything positive for Republicans since most people are smart enough to realize that she isn't setting the broad agenda for Democrats, President Obama is.
Instead of wasting their time attacking Pelosi, prominent GOPers would do better to start training more of their rhetorical fire at Obama. With the massive spending the president has been doing, it's not like he's not providing an ample target.
We're starting to see the beginning of this strategic shift in the health care debate. Expect to see more of it now that Republicans have finally realized that Barack Obama isn't an unstoppable political force.
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