Confidence in Congress at All Time Low

Filed under: Congress, Democrats, Polls — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on June 21, 2007 @ 9:04 am CEST

Bad news for the Democrat-controlled Congress:

Just 14% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress.

This 14% Congressional confidence rating is the all-time low for this measure, which Gallup initiated in 1973. The previous low point for Congress was 18% at several points in the period of time 1991 to 1994.

Roger L. Simon remarks:

This should give a little pause to those Democratic Party triumphalists who think their crowd is going to waltz into the White House in ‘08. But that’s the least of it. The more important question is why our government is run by such dimwitted mediocrities on both sides of the aisle. I have written before that Silvestre Reyes is the poster child of our Congress - a man who, as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee [sic], couldn’t tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. And he’s still in office! Think about that, those of you who run businesses large and small. As CEO of Pajamas Media, if one of our editors were that uniformed at this point in history I would have no choice but to show him or her the door (not that any of our editors are even remotely that ignorant).

The comparison between government and business has been made many times before and I used to give government the benefit of the doubt. And I am still convinced that there are many things government does better than the private sector, things that it must do. But if government is run by the likes of Pelosi, Reid, Reyes and Hastert, then Heaven help us.

This is one of the major problems of every Democracy, I think: at a certain moment, the most talented people prefer to have successful business careers and ignore politics (or lobby with politicians to make themselves even more successful). Leaders of a nation should be the most talented of the talented, the best of the best. In America - but not just in America, also in the Netherlands - the best of the best are CEOs. Now, if, then, the merely best would become Congressmen, there would not be a very big problem. However, the sad reality of the situation is that ‘the best’ prefer business over politics as well.

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1 Interested

June 21, 2007 @ 3:56 pm CEST

Well they’ll just blame Bush for the Dem’s bad ratings anyway. (funniest take I’d ever seen).

And it’s not strangely dead on accurate for those of us who said after the 06 election that there are no real differences between the Dem’s and the Repubs. (in terms of integrity, morals or behavior).