How the Headlines Get the Polls Wrong About Obama and the Economy

But in recent weeks -- with unemployment stuck near 10 percent and the $1.6 trillion budget deficit spreading panic in Washington -- Keynes has become about as popular as Dick Cheney at a human rights dinner. A statistic ripped out of the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll showing that only six percent of Americans believe that the stimulus has created "a substantial number of new jobs" became cable TV fodder for foes of big government. Even Obama himself sounded apologetic Wednesday as he gamely tried to celebrate the first anniversary of congressional passage of his economic recovery plan: "It certainly wasn't a politically easy decision to make for me or for the members of Congress who supported it -- because, let's face it, no large expenditure is ever that popular, particularly at a time when we're also facing a massive deficit."

So is it time to declare Keynesian economics as outmoded as Dear Abby lectures on the dangers of heavy petting? Have voters become so hostile to government efforts to create jobs that pretty soon even Nancy Pelosi will be applying to join the Tea Party movement? Will the Obama stimulus package be remembered as the governmental equivalent of the Edsel, New Coke and the subprime mortgage business all rolled into one?

A close reading of seven separate national polls conducted this month suggests that funeral orations for Keynesian ideas and government job creation programs are not only premature, but probably unnecessary. Without minimizing deep fears of a long-term recession (a CNN/Opinion Research Poll found that 83 percent of registered voters describe economic conditions as "poor"), Americans still believe that Washington can help the nation recover from dire straits.

Nothing seems more devastating on the surface for Obama than that poll number suggesting that less than 1-in-16 (6 percent) of all adults believe that the economic stimulus package has created jobs. But what most news reports neglected to mention was that in response to the same multiple choice question in the Times/CBS Poll, another 41 percent of all adults said they believe that the stimulus "will create jobs, but hasn't yet." What this means is that 47 percent of all adults (a number almost identical to Obama's approval rating) believe that the stimulus has or will create a large number of jobs. This is not a ringing popular endorsement of Obama-economics (or Keynes, for that matter), but neither is it a repudiation.

Judging from the apocalyptic cries from the deficit-hawk establishment in Washington and newspaper headlines all but equating America with Greece ("PARTY GRIDLOCK FEEDS NEW FEAR OF A DEBT CRISIS" led the front page of Wednesday's New York Times), it would be easy to assume that most Americans are in a pitchfork-wielding mood about Obama's red-ink budget. Indeed, a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 37 percent of adults say they are "angry" about "the growing federal budget deficit." But this is not a dramatically new finding -- an identical number of adults said that they were "angry" over the deficit last March when Obama was riding high and the debt crisis was not in the headlines. More telling is that 48 percent of adults say that the deficit "bothers" them, but does not make them irate.

A tricky factor in comparing polls conducted at roughly the same time by different news organizations is question wording. Fox News, which polled registered voters, asked a similar question to Pew about anger over the deficit. The difference is that the Fox News' question included the factually accurate detail that "the federal budget deficit will reach over $1.5 trillion." Still, the Fox News poll found that only 32 percent of the voters (and only 43 percent of Republicans) said that they were "angry" about this budgetary shortfall. Sure, 54 percent of those polled by Fox said that they were "worried," but it is difficult to maintain a cavalier attitude after an anonymous voice on the telephone tells you that the deficit will exceed $1.5 trillion.

A Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters asked the blunt and politically relevant question of which is more important "reducing the federal budget deficit or reducing unemployment." The answer in a 72 to 23 percent landslide was "reducing unemployment." In fact, every demographic subgroup in the poll (including Republicans and "born-again evangelicals") chose fighting unemployment by a better than a two-to-one margin. The next question in the Quinnipiac survey was straight out of Keynes, asking voters whether "using federal dollars to create jobs" would lead to a lower or a larger deficit. The response should lift the hearts of big-government liberals as voters by a 59 to 33 percent margin said that such government spending would reduce the deficit. A majority of every demographic group (except Republicans and born-again evangelicals) expressed the belief that fighting unemployment would increase taxes and thereby help staunch the flow of red ink.

None of these polling numbers guarantees anything in politics, let alone a safe passage for the Democrats through the shoals of the November congressional elections. But it is intriguing that in the midst of a purported political uprising against Obama's profligate spending, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that adults gave a tiny 45 to 43 percent edge to the president over the Republicans in being trusted "to do a better job handling the federal budget deficit."

The truth is that the political community in Washington, egged on by cable TV pundits and newspaper political reporters, periodically goes into hyperdrive following a story line about the mood of the electorate. Headline-making poll numbers become convenient building blocks in constructing this narrative of the moment. But political skeptics (a small but persistent band) like to read the actual poll questions and study the numbers before they jump on any bandwagon. That is why it is a mistake currently to assume -- just because February's theme is Obama in trouble -- that the era of Keynesian economics is over and that voters prefer a government whose ambitions are as modest as those of Calvin Coolidge.