GALLUP SURVEY may be right on target with that assessment. Lisa Page already has spoken to several members of Congress regarding the scandal, and while those discussions were not public, participants hinted that the FBI attorney was indeed more forthcoming than Strzok.
Republican Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, for instance, told reporters on Friday that Page’s “willingness to cooperate today speaks well of her.”
Another Republican lawmaker, Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas, echoed that tone and said he believes Page is “a very forthcoming witness.” Nearly eight in 10 Americans think Congress is disconnected from their concerns, a new poll says.
The new Gallup survey released on Monday found that 79 percent believe most lawmakers are out of touch with their constituents. Even more telling, it found that 48 percent believe their own personal Congressional representative is divorced from their interests.
Voters are generally more prone to liking their own representatives.
Overall, the poll found Congress had a dismal 14 percent approval rating.
Gallup found that 52 percent of respondents believe that most of Congress is corrupt versus 42 percent who do not. Thirty-two percent believe their own member is corrupt, while 59 percent do not.
Gallup additionally found that most Americans think Congress places the needs of special interests above their own. Sixty-nine percent believe most of Congress focuses on special interests, versus 25 percent who do not.
Gallup added that 47 percent believe their own lawmaker pays more attention to special interests, with 43 percent arguing that they focus more on their constituents instead.
Gallup’s latest survey sampled 1,025 adults nationwide via telephone from Sept. 9-13. It has a 4 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
The 3 Reasons Congress' Approval Rating Is At 10%
A new poll places Congress' approval rating at an all-time low. So, the race to the bottom in public opinion is between the News organizations and Congress.
After several years of Congress’ approval rating slumming in the 20s and the teens, a new CNN/ORC poll places the approval rating for Congress at a record low of 10%.
In a healthy democracy, logic would dictate that a legislature shouldn’t have such low approval ratings over the period of multiple election cycles. So why is this happening?
Let’s attempt the most apolitical analysis possible of why things are the way they are. Three factors come to mind, and they can all be considered distortions of the “tribe” mentality that normally binds a society.
1. The voters’ myopia. As voters, we see our representative as a member of our tribe. This mess in Washington is not his or her fault. It’s only the other ones who are lousy or the system that’s lousy.
A Gallup study from this past spring found that Americans, on the whole, gave a 16% approval rating to Congress. But voters, on average, gave their own representative a much more charitable 46% approval rating.
Gallup noted:
Although Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of the job Congress, in general, is doing, voters re-elect most members of Congress in every election. This phenomenon is partly explained by the finding that Americans have significantly more positive views of their own representative than they do of Congress overall.
Tweaking laws about campaign financing or term limits may well thus be pointless, as long as voters view their own congress maniac with such a parochial and rose-tinted perspective.
2. The leader’s myopia. Set aside all our usual griping about power and greed and other intoxicants. Leaders have tribes too. They’re just as subject to the persuasion of various caucuses as a seven-year-old in a schoolyard. They can need approval, and they can be bullied—mostly by the people in their immediate, daily physical space.
And again, voters tend to forgive this in their own member of Congress more easily than in Congress as a whole.
Don’t doubt our elected officials’ patriotism. Members of Congress take office with noble ideals and intentions, and those ideals and intentions typically do not diminish. They simply get rerouted by partisan interests. The representative is convinced that, by responding to the few important people in his or her face all day, he or she is responding to a higher calling.
3. The media’s myopia. Our system is geared less to focus on issues of substance and geared more to covering politics like a horse race. The focus is on announcing today’s winners and losers, which makes compromise and long-term objectives seem less attractive to voters and leaders alike.
Democratic governance is a serious business, as the great Pericles reminded his fellow Athenians 24 centuries ago, at the outset of the Peloponnesian War. It requires voters and politicians to offer a thoughtful analysis of long-term social and economic trends. But the media has perhaps become less serious than the voters and the politicians themselves.
Finally, if you want the best explanation of how mass media has helped turn the nation into a dysfunctional current reality-TV show, you should read the late Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. That prescient book, written in 1985, seems truer than ever today. Meanwhile, our future looks a bit less amusing.
