CNN poll: 52% say global messiah doesn’t deserve reelection

Sounds bad, but wait until they start rolling out those cool new backdrops for his speeches. Approval-rating lightning, baby.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, released Tuesday, indicates that only 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election, with 63 percent saying no.

According to the survey, 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected – also an all-time low in CNN polling – while 44 percent say their representative doesn’t deserve to be returned to office in November.

The numbers on both questions are even lower than in 1994, when an anti-incumbent fever helped Republicans win back control of both the House and the Senate from Democrats.

The One’s numbers stand at a robust 49/50, unchanged from last month. In fairness, congressional Republican incumbents are momentarily polling as badly as Democrats — in each case, just 41 percent say that most members of each caucus should be reelected — but the respective trend lines over the past two years are obviously very different. Let’s see if we can figure out why Democrats are sinking. Over to you, Zogby:

In a brutal assessment of the Democratically authored healthcare reform bills pending in Congress and the party’s approach to healthcare, more than half of the respondents to a new Zogby International-University of Texas Health Science Center poll said that lawmakers should start from scratch.

Of the more than 2,500 people surveyed from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1, 57 percent agreed with a statement that Congress should start over — which is exactly what Republicans are demanding and what President Barack Obama insists he will not do…

If Obama is counting on his personal appeal and presidential leadership to change the public’s views at the summit, the survey findings offer a worrisome appraisal: More than 80 percent of respondents said they heard Obama’s remarks on healthcare reform during his State of the Union address but 48.1 percent of those people said it did nothing to change their views.

I’m actually surprised that it’s only 48 percent. The country tuned this guy out on this issue a long time ago, which makes the new and improved “more cowbell!” messaging strategy that much more obtuse.

Health care will eventually be off the table one way or another but I don’t know what Democrats (or Republicans) can do to fix something like this. When nearly 60 percent of the public expects to be flatly lied to by their representatives about what their tax dollars will be used for, I think you’re looking at a nearly irreparable crisis of confidence in the feds’ sense of fiscal responsibility:

President Obama may have to go back on his campaign promise against raising taxes on Americans making less than $250,000 a year in order to reduce the country’s record budget deficit.

But a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that even if the president and Congress raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit, 58% of voters think they are more likely to spend the money on new government programs.

Just 23% believe they are more likely to use the new tax money for deficit reduction, and another 19% aren’t sure.

Bear that number in mind for when Obama inevitably announces some sort of tax hike. People are grumpy enough about paying more to the feds under the best of circumstances, but when it comes packaged with a broken campaign promise and a profound suspicion that their money’s going to be dumped into new and ever more bloated federal programs, a “read my lips” backlash shall be a-brewin’. Exit question: Are the Dems seriously going to try to ride this guy’s coattails into November? Have they been informed yet that he doesn’t really have any coattails left to speak of?

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