Matthew Yglesias makes a common liberal claim about Dick Cheney's popularity:
Substantively, the man is a horror. Conveniently, he's also wildly unpopular. I mean, he's got to be one of the least-popular major American political figures ever. It seems to me that "When Dick Cheney criticizes the House Democrats, that's how we know we must be doing something right" is along the right lines. I mean, I think the period during which Cheney and his "gravitas" were well-respected around the nation is long behind us at this point.
While it's true that Cheney is wildly unpopular, he's actually not any more unpopular than President Bush at this point. For instance, the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll (March 9-11) has job approval for Bush at 37 percent and Cheney at 34 percent. In part, that's a reflection of the fact that President Bush's approval is heavily concentrated among conservatives, who at this point may like Cheney more than Bush. More importantly, Bush is the most unpopular president at this point in his term since Harry Truman in 1951. It would be hard for Cheney to do much worse.
Update 3/13 10:10 AM: Yglesias put up a new post linking to this one, and one of his commenters points to the latest New York Times poll, which does show a favorability gap (different than the job approval numbers above) between Bush and Cheney -- 30% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of President Bush and 18% said they had a favorable opinion of Cheney. However, the 18% number is out of whack with most favorability polls on Cheney. The most recent poll I can find before the NYT one that asked favorability questions about both men is USA Today/Gallup from Feb. 9-11, which shows 44% favorability for Bush and 37% for Cheney. So there may be a favorability gap between them of reasonable proportions.
Update 3/13 8:25 PM: A fellow graduate student points out that fewer people may express an opinion about Cheney, which turns out to be right. Cheney's favorable/unfavorable ratio in the NYT poll is 18% favorable, 48% unfavorable, while Bush's is 30%/55%. In short, among those who express an opinion, Cheney's favorables are worse, but in absolute terms more people actually have an unfavorable opinion of Bush.
In other words, you were wrong and now you have to backfill because it never occured to you that job approval and personal popularity are far different things.
Doh!
You can post a blog entry faster than you can think, can't you?
Posted by: Lettuce | March 13, 2007 at 05:51 PM