The Daily Background

This economic bailout situation is, I suspect, confusing to a lot of people. As evidence of this, I’ll point out that even the polls on it are confusing.

According to the latest LAT/Bloomberg poll, Americans oppose government bailouts:

Americans oppose government rescues of ailing financial companies by a decisive margin, and blame Wall Street and President George W. Bush for the credit crisis.

By a margin of 55 percent to 31 percent, Americans say it’s not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayer dollars, even if their collapse could damage the economy, according to the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.

And yet, according to the latest Pew Research poll, Americans feel the exact opposite way:

By a margin of almost two-to-one the American public thinks the government is doing the right thing in investing billions of dollars to try to keep financial institutions and markets secure. Reacting to initial reports of the federal bailout plan over the weekend, 57% said the government was doing the right thing, while 30% said it was doing the wrong thing.

Phew.

In fact, just about the only thing that seems to be consistent with all the polling that’s going on about the economy is that McCain is seriously flubbing it and Obama is showing himself to be a cool hand. Both the LAT and Pew poll have literally identical numbers on this: 35% of Americans favor McCain’s reaction and 47% or 48% think Obama’s handling of the bailout situation.

McCain is not at home when the debate is about the economy (and he seems to have a new weakness exposed every day). The Obama campaign scored a major coup when they negotiated a switch in the final closing debate topic to the economy instead of foreign policy, which was brilliant.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog