U.S. Politicians, Media Censured On Schiavo Case (Gallup / CNN / USAT)

Polling Data

Do you approve or disapprove of the way each of the following has handled the case involving Terri Schiavo?

President Republicans Democrats The Media
Approve 31% 26% 28% 43%
Disapprove 52% 47% 42% 46%
Unsure 17% 27% 30% 11%

Source: Gallup / CNN / USA Today
Methodology: Telephone interviews to 620 American adults, conducted from on Mar. 22, 2005. Margin of error is 4 per cent.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&itemID=6471

With the overwhelming majority of the public on our side?

Some posters here have suggested that the Democrats should keep their mouths shut on this issue, and others too ..... pick a different time and place to fight ..... and the Republicans will sink themselves!

Well, most Democrats and the Democratic Party have followed that advice and you now see the outcome.

Don't take a stand on any issue .... any issue .... except one. Social Security.

After all, they really didn't do anything at all. For the most part, they let the Rebublicans have their way with little more than a whimper of protest.

Still, it seemed that the party's highest principle was to have almost none at all.

I consider it must reading:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61694-2005Mar23.html

When are they going to give us a spineless smiley?

I wonder if there's something that would break it down.

Interesting that Bush (chimp) comes off the worst, though. Arguably, he didn't have a lot to do with it, directly. So, I think the right wing and Republicans are worse off for this.

Polling Data

Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Republican leaders in Congress are doing?

Mar. 2005 Feb. 2004

Approve 39% 41%
Disapprove 44% 42%

Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Democratic leaders in Congress are doing?

Mar. 2005 Feb. 2004

Approve 37% 38%
Disapprove 44% 42%

Source: Princeton Survey Research Associates / Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
Methodology: Telephone interviews to 1,505 American adults, conducted from Mar. 17 to Mar. 21, 2005. Margin of error is 3 per cent.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&itemID=6481

Many of them aren't differentiating between the parties.They are just mad at anyone they think is politisizing the issue.

The Democrats taking a strong public stand would have just made that worse.

When your enemy is sinking in quicksand, you don't jump in to push him down.

The damage this is doing to the GOP is going to be deep and long lasting. The damage to the democrats is minimal.

And besides, I trust any CNN/Gallup poll about as much as I do Tom Delay.

.. but isn't 620 people a bit too, I don't know, few for pollings of this kind? I would imagine 6200 or something like that.

It is scientifically beyond dispute that a correctly done random poll reflects, of more than something like 450 or more gives a 98% probability of being within the stated margin of error.

All we're trying to do is get a general sense of people's take on how this went down. If you want to get a lot more specific, then you've got to dig into the wording of the question, the sampling method, yada yada. But who needs more than 4%+/- on this issue?

Which there ALWAYS is in cheap media polls.

If we had fought this on any grounds OTHER THAN TAXPAYER's BURDEN (which liberals seem unwilling to appreciate) we would have been nailed to the cross.

As it was, we came off as well as possible in the public's eyes.

But I keep asking myself (and others on this board to no avail), why in the hell are liberals incapable of seeing the opportunity to put the right wing's nuts in a vice on an issue like this? Why? Why? Why?

Here's the deal:
--She is being kept alive at the expense of taxpayer dollars through Medicaid, Medicare and public funding of the Hospice.
--The purpose of the law is not to terminate hope.
--The purpose of the law is to draw a uniformly applied line beyond which the taxpayer's have no further responsibility because the odds of eventual recovery are so remote.
--Clearly that line has been crossed in the Shiavo case.
--However, if there are those who believe that she may eventually recover, than we should step aside and let them have the opportunity to put their money where their faith is.
--Let those claiming she should be kept alive privately assume responsibility to pay for the life support and hospitalization needed to keep her life artificially sustained for so long as they have faith that she may recover.
--It is certainly no skin off anybody's nose if her family and others choose to do that. But the taxpayers should not have to fund it any longer.
--This position drives a wedge between the right wing's evangelical base and its anti-tax base

why should anyone expect Democrats to make some large gesture to explain their "take" on it?

Wouldn't it seem somewhat ordinary to assume people who aren't raising hell believe the people who did were wrong? Were they REALLY supposed to make public pronouncements that they agree with the judges, appeals judges, and the Florida (Republican) Legislature?

It wasn't the Democrats' fight. They were NOT at fault.

This article is misleading because it assumes people SHOULD judge Democrats over something which should have never come up in the first place. Looks like a right-wing attempt to cover their behinds by claiming Deomcrats were at fault, as well, in the opinion of the general public. Nonsense.

... (to within the MOE) unable to distinguish between Rs and Ds and just blaming politicians.

The article contains very little interpretation of the poll: "52 per cent of respondents disapprove of the way the president has handled the case. Less than 30 per cent of Americans approve of the way Republicans and Democrats have behaved ..." is just about all of it. Of course, there may well be biases behind the questions asked, including intended uses of polling results: daleo's remark sheds some light on this.

Where Are the Democrats?
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, March 24, 2005; Page A19

Rep. Tom DeLay is called "The Hammer." He is a man of fierce beliefs who has long confused politics with war -- religious war at that. At one time he would have been labeled an "extremist," the sort of politician whom reporters seek out for colorful, wacko quotes. But now he is in the GOP mainstream where, among other things, he has bludgeoned the Democratic Party into pathetic meekness. On the Terri Schiavo debate, the party went AWOL....Most of them seemed to be cowering in some bunker, calling their consultants and pollsters, asking what they should do and how they should do it. Please, have a memo on the desk by morning.

You could call this a misreading of public sentiment, and it is that, for sure. When the instant pollsters reported on their instant polls, it turned out that by lopsided majorities the public was appalled at what Congress had done. By a margin of 63 percent to 28 percent, an ABC News poll said Americans supported the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. An even larger majority -- 70 percent -- opposed Congress getting into the act. And for some reason, 67 percent of those polled said Congress was more interested in scoring political points than in Terry Schiavo's fate. As they say in the red states, amen to that....

***

....for me the real loser was the Democratic Party. It showed that it's almost totally without leadership. If there is a national figure (other than Barney Frank) who stood up and took on the GOP in this matter, his -- or her -- name does not come to mind. In the Senate, oddly enough, it was Virginia's John Warner who pointed out that he opposed the bill -- and he's a Republican, for goodness' sake. The Democrats were nowhere.

It's not hard to understand why. A vote against the bill would almost certainly be used by some future campaign as a vote in favor of putting Schiavo to death. In a quick TV spot, that sort of stuff can do real damage. At the same time, a fair number of Democrats who were appalled by the bill were reluctant to put their colleagues on the spot. It might have been okay for Ted Kennedy or John Kerry to oppose the bill -- they come from Massachusetts, after all -- but it could be a different story for some Democrat whose state is not quite so blue. Out of consideration for the imperiled, some tongues were clearly held. Still, it seemed that the party's highest principle was to have almost none at all.

Once again, it was a Republican -- Christopher Shays of Connecticut -- who got it right. "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy," he said....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61694-2005Mar23.html?nav%3Dmost_emailed_emailfriend&sub=AR

Yeah right.

Who will care about this issue 6 months from now? Probably only the nuts that want to keep Terri alive. This could work to our advantage if the fundimentalists believe that the GOP didn't do everything they could to save Terri.