Pre-rejecting the Obama Agenda
By Dave Anderson:
Liberals and Democrats have argued that the two governors' races that the Democrats lost this week turned on a combination of local issues and weak Democratic candidates who would not do anything to excite the Democratic base.
Conservatives and Republicans have argued that these two races are a national referandum on the Obama agenda and that the answer was a decisive no to having a government that can actually attempt to solve some problems instead of engaging in a looting expedition.
If that is the case, then New Jersey must have been ahead of the crowd as the following three minutes on Google shows:
November 03, 2008, 5:32AM
Gov. Jon Corzine's approval rating has remained steady in the past month, according to a poll released today.
The Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found 46 percent of respondents approve of the Democrat's performance, while 37 percent disapprove. That's a slight improvement from the marks he received in October, when 45 percent approved of the job he was doing, while 39 percent disapproved.
Meanwhile, 24 percent of respondents said the state is headed in the right direction, while 65 percent say it's off on the wrong track. Last month, 23 percent said the state was headed the right way, while 67 percent said it was headed the wrong way.
Please note the dateline. If the rest of Google is correct, Obama was elected President on November 4, 2008. So New Jersey, according to the conservative argument, pre-rejected the Obama agenda a year in advance despite giving him a comfortable victory the day after this poll was published. The other explanation is that it is tough to win as an incumbent when job approval ratings are barely a net positive and the states' voters think the state is heading in the wrong direction by a 5:2 margin.
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