Polls are showing that the public is beginning to believe the lies and bad reasoning the GOP has cooked up to defeat Obama’s health care reform plans.
How could the public be fooled by such nonsense?
People are inattentive and gullible and many deeply resent a black man in the White House.
But Charles Blow has another explanation that I think is quite plausible.
But it’s also about something more fundamental: fluctuations of basic trust in the federal government.
These fluctuations highlight a peculiar quirk of recent American politics — according to an analysis of The New York Times/CBS News polls from the past 33 years, Americans seem to trust the government substantially more after a Republican president is elected than they do after a Democratic one is elected — at least at the outset.
That might be because Republicans eviscerate government when they are in power thus leaving a mess for Democrats to clean up; or perhaps it is because the public is generally aware that Democrats will use the government to achieve their ends so government trustworthiness is a bigger issue when Democrats are in power.
At any rate, the biggest casualty of the right-wing’s anti-government attitude and the incompetence of the Bush Administration is the lack of trust in government.
