The People's State of the Union: Giving Congress a Piece of Their Mind

Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union address on Tuesday will cover familiar ground: the economy, the war, the need for bipartisanship.

But below is a different kind of report -- distilled from opinion polls over the last 12 months about what the American public says it thinks (if, of course, the pollsters can be trusted).

If it were the topic of the address this Tuesday, here are the major talking points lawmakers and political leaders would hear:

We don't like you and think it's been a long time since you did a good job.

When Gallup averaged its poll numbers for the 2009-2010 session of Congress, the percentage of Americans who approved of its performance was 25 percent – one of the lowest annual averages in two decades, surpassed only by the 23 percent approval rating during the 2007-2008 session. At one point, in Gallup's December poll, the approval rate was as low as 13 points. That was generally the story in just about every major poll, along with numbers showing that Americans disapproved of both congressional Democrats and Republicans, and of the two major parties in general.

We also don't like the way you talk to each other and deal with each other, and frankly, we're tired of listening to it. Watching you is like spending a day with Frank and Estelle Costanza.

Last fall before the elections, a Pew Research Center/National Journal poll asked Americans their perception of how Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill were getting along, and 77 percent said they were "bickering" more – a big jump from April 2009 when 53 percent had that view. More recently, a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted after the Arizona shootings found that eight in10 Americans say the tone of political discourse has been somewhat or very negative, or outright angry. (Thirty-one percent described the tone as angry).

That's not what Americans want. A Gallup poll conducted in mid-January found that 80 percent want President Obama to work for legislation that both parties can agree on even if some Democrats don't like it, and 83 percent say it is somewhat or very important that Republican congressional leaders do the same in working with Obama and the Democrats. That said, a large percentage of Republicans -- particularly those who say they agree with the tea party movement -- want their leaders to stand up to Obama rather than compromise, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

We put a new bunch of people in charge here this year, but you're all still on trial.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll in early December said that while a plurality of Americans thought the Republican takeover of the House was a good thing, the numbers weren't overwhelming -- 41 percent called it a good thing, 27 percent said it was a bad thing and 30 percent didn't think it made any difference, which means 57 percent weren't wowed. (The Post headline about its poll: "Public is not yet sold on GOP." That's not surprising since the Republicans had not taken charge yet, but certainly an indication that they will have to prove themselves now that they have the power).

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this month found that 51 percent don't expect congressional Republicans to bring much change, good or bad, while 25 percent say they will bring the right kind of change and 20 percent believe they will bring the wrong kind of change.

Americans still trust President Obama more than congressional Republicans to handle the economy. They favor Obama slightly more on whom they trust to cope with the main problems facing the nation.

Now, turning to matters that count: the economy still is in the toilet.

In a Quinnipiac poll conducted Jan. 4-11, eight in 10 Americans rated the economy as "not so good" or "poor," (with 43 percent in each of those categories). Seventy-three percent said the U.S. was still in a recession even though the National Bureau of Economic Research said it ended in June 2009. All the other major polls reflect the same gloomy assessment. Just about every poll shows that a majority of Americans still think the country is on the wrong track, although those numbers have come down a little.

Yeah, we're getting more worried about the deficit, but your top priority needs to be fixing unemployment.

The percentage of Americans concerned about the growing federal deficit has been inching up, but it is far behind the priority Americans put on dealing with unemployment and jobs. The Republicans made federal spending a top issue in the midterm elections and have vowed to make cutting the budget a similarly high priority in the new Congress. Now, they face the challenge of doing so when most Americans – despite saying they want action on the deficit – oppose many of the proposals that would deal with it.

We do think we're coming out of the woods a little, so don't mess it up.

Fifty-four percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University poll in early January said they believed the economy was beginning to recover.

Most of us don't like the health care reform law, but we're divided on what to do about it, so let's get clear on what we want to see done and what we don't.

A Quinnipiac University poll in early January said the public supported repeal of the health care reform measure by 48 percent to 43 percent with 8 percent undecided, although other polls produced an opposite result and found a softening of opposition to the law passed last March. A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in mid-January found that while Americans oppose the health care reform law by 50 percent to 45 percent – a finding that generally squares with most other polls during and after 2010 – only 18 percent favored outright repeal. Another 19 percent wanted to repeal just parts of it. A recent Pew Research Center poll said the number of Americans wanted to expand the law was nearly the same as those who wanted to repeal it.

Results like the Post/ABC poll are rooted in a variety of dynamics. While most polls find that a majority of Americans don't like the reform measure or don't think it will help them personally, significant majorities support individual provisions such as not letting insurers reject people with pre-existing conditions. By the same token, they mostly detest the requirement that every American must obtain insurance or be penalized.

Beyond the specific pros and cons of the measure itself, many polling analysts believe that views on the massive reform package were colored by the backlash against big government in general, whether it was a greater role in the health care system or plunging in to bail out the financial industry and major auto companies. "Right now we're not really fighting about health care," said Republican pollster Bill McInturff last October. "If you look at most Republican advertising and most of the issue-advocacy advertising that relates to health care, it's being used as a proof point about cost and the role of government, and it's a pretty powerful proof point."

Obama convinced most of us in 2008 that the right target was Afghanistan and not Iraq, but that's getting old, we don't see things getting better, and we're tired of it.

Although a recent Gallup poll suggested that views of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan had turned somewhat more positive, surveys toward the end of last year showed a rise in the number of Americans who have lost faith in whether the U.S. is doing the right thing in pursuing the war. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in December found 60 percent who said the war in Afghanistan had not been worth fighting while 34 percent said it was, the highest negative figure in Post/ABC News polls going back to 2007. The last time a majority said it was worth fighting was in December 2009, and then it was by a bare 52 percent.

Even after seeing all the photos of glaciers melting, and stranded polar bears, we're not as fired up about climate change as we used to be. Global warming? So yesterday. Al Gore? So yesterday.

Given that the economy has been in the tank for so long, and so many Americans are still hurting, it is not all that surprising that the environment has dropped on the priority list. It was at the bottom of 15 priorities in a Jan. 7-9 Gallup poll in terms of issues that Americans regarded as extremely or very important. A more recent Pew poll said Americans ranked global warming 21^st on a list of 22 "top policy priorities for 2011," just ahead of obesity.

Last March, Gallup did its annual update on the public's attitude toward the environment and found that Americans over the past two years had become less worried about the threat of global warming and less convinced that it is already happening. Forty-eight percent said the seriousness of global warming had been generally exaggerated, up from 30 percent in 2006. The Pew Research Center reported in October that 59 percent believed there was solid evidence of global warming, with 34 percent of them blaming it on human activity, but that overall number was down from 79 percent in July 2006.

Mr. President, it's a good time to ask whether you can get back the magic you had in 2008.

Obama's campaign mantra in 2008 besides, "Yes, we can!" was "Change you can believe in." Most 2010 polls found that most Americans didn't think much change had occurred in the way Washington did business since Obama's election. A USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-January said 70 percent believed, after his first two years in office, that Obama needed to do better when it came to "bringing about the changes this country needs."

Obama's job approval marks, which sagged into the mid-40s in many polls during late 2010, have started to recover some and inch back toward and even pass the 50 percent mark after the lame-duck session when many Americans approved of the deal he struck to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and were moved by his speech in Tucson paying tribute to the shooting victims. A majority still disapprove of the way Obama is handling the top issue facing the country – the economy – but by a smaller margin than in previous surveys.

But public opinion is mixed over how successful or not Obama was in his first two years and Americans are unsure of whether he will do better in the next two.

John Boehner, even though you're the Speaker now, a big chunk of Americans still don't know enough about you yet to have an opinion. Are you ready for that to change?

All during 2010, when Democrats tried to make John Boehner a household name in hopes of making him the same kind of lightning rod that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had become for Republicans, Boehner continued to glide by unknown to a large percentage of Americans. That may be changing with a recent Gallup poll showing that his increased visibility has pushed the number of those who see him favorably up by eight points since the elections. But about a third of the public still doesn't know enough about him to have a view one way or the other. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Pelosi began their jobs on high notes of public approval, only to leave with soaring negatives and as polarizing figures. Boehner isn't likely to cut quite as controversial a figure as either of them, but the day may come when he sheds a tear over losing his relative anonymity.

And let Sarah Palin know, we don't want her to be president in 2012.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll in mid-December found that six in 10 Americans rule out voting for Palin to be president. See a new poll on Palin? It's likely to contain bad news for her when it comes to the general electorate. While her loyal following certainly would make her a force if she jumped into the GOP primaries, the latest Marist Institute/McClatchy poll showed Obama with double-digit leads over Palin, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but while Romney and Huckabee each got 81 percent support from fellow Republicans, Palin got only 66 percent. In the most recent Gallup poll, conducted after the shootings in Arizona and the controversy over her response to it, the number of those seeing Palin favorably fell to 38 percent, the lowest since she became a national figure in 2008.

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