A new Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll finds respondents favoring Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama handling the economy over Republican Sen. John McCain by 45 to 33 percent — and opposed to the proposed government financial bailout.
And despite some articles arguing that the roots of the crisis go back to Democratic White House and Congressional control, Americans blame Wall Street and President George Bush.
Americans oppose government rescues of ailing financial companies by a decisive margin, and blame Wall Street and President George W. Bush for the credit crisis.
By a margin of 55 percent to 31 percent, Americans say it’s not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayer dollars, even if their collapse could damage the economy, according to the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.
Poll respondents say Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama would do a better job handling the financial crisis than Republican John McCain, by a margin of 45 percent to 33 percent. Almost half of voters say the Democrat has better ideas to strengthen the economy than his Republican opponent.
Six weeks before the presidential election, almost 80 percent of Americans say the U.S. is going in the wrong direction, the biggest percentage since the poll began asking that question in 1991.
Remember: polls are snapshots in time. But these numbers can’t be uplifting to McCain’s campaign since it underscores the task he’ll now have: he’ll have to argue he is the one who can fix the economy and that Obama can’t be trusted to do so.
However, one poll is not necessarily the final word: an earlier poll found that Americans SUPPORTED the bailout:
By a margin of nearly two-to-one, Americans surveyed say the federal government is doing the right thing in intervening in the financial market credit crunch, and by a double-digit margin most voters say that Democrat Barack Obama is better-suited than Republican John McCain to deal with the crisis at hand.
In the first full look at the public’s reaction to the bailout that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unveiled over the weekend, 57 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in Washington on Friday through Monday said the government was doing the right thing — and just 30 percent called the intervention the wrong thing.
“Support for the administration’s plan to bailout many of the nation’s troubled financial institutions is largely bipartisan,” Pew President Andrew Kohut reports.
The Sept. 19-22 survey of 1,003 adults also found that more voters view Obama as the presdential candidate best able to address the financial crisis :47 percent favoring Obama on that count, 35 percent McCain. Among independent voters, it’s Obama 44, McCain 30 on that question.
The bottom lines:
1. The public can go either way on the bailout, depending on how persuasive a case is made on either side.
2. The economy is not an issue that will make McCain’s campaign for the White House easier. Add to that McCain’s worsening relations with the press, and his task got a lot tougher after the recent events on Wall Street.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.