A cranky nation looks ahead to November vote

WASHINGTON — We are, pollsters tell us, a cranky nation.

We're cranky about the Iraq war. We're cranky about the president. We're cranky about Congress.

"We're cranky about just about everything," said pollster Scott Rasmussen.

Polls show a majority of Americans have just "some" or no confidence in the institutions that guide religious life, treat them when they are ill, educate their children, handle their money, give them their news, run labor organizations, mete out justice, run big business and sell them health insurance.

At the very bottom of the confidence list in a recent Gallup Poll: The people elected by the people to do the people's business.

Not depressing enough? Ponder this from a Rasmussen Reports poll released in conjunction with the Fourth of July:

"As the nation celebrates its 232nd birthday, half of the voters think America's best days have come and gone." And only a third "think the country's best days are still to come."

It is against this backdrop – an unprecedented one, some say – that a new president will be elected Nov. 4.

There have been elections in tough economic times. There have been elections amid unpopular wars. There have been elections when lots of folks thought politicians were useless crooks. There may never have been anything quite like this.

"It's probably been some time since we confronted the sort of confluence of negativity that we seem to have right now, when people are down about so many things," said University of Missouri political scientist Peverill Squire. "Obviously people were unhappy about the economy in '92, unhappy about Vietnam in '68. But usually you don't have a bad economy, an unpopular war and a general malaise all occurring at the same time. It's hard to find a perfect parallel for this particular campaign."

And this particular campaign is playing out to an electorate with a high proportion of particularly dismayed voters.

"America's baby boomers are in a collective funk," the Pew Research Center said in the recent release of its Social and Demographic Trends survey of 44- to 62-year-olds.

(Optional add begins)

The overall malaise is measured in recent surveys showing declining confidence in key institutions.

Only about one in three respondents to a June Gallup Poll said they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the nation's medical system. The number was similar for public schools.

Those numbers were not good, but good enough to put the medical system and public schools in fifth and sixth place among the 16 institutions tested in the survey.

The military was atop the Gallup Poll with 71 percent of respondents expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in it. Next was small business, at 60 percent and the police at 58 percent.

No other institution inspired more than half of respondents to say they had "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in it. Some topped the 50 percent mark when you add in folks who said they had "some" confidence in them.

But when you include only those with the higher levels of confidence, "the church or organized religion" came closest to majority approval at 48 percent.

From the bottom up: Congress, 12 percent; HMOs, 13 percent; "big business," 20 percent; the criminal justice system, 20 percent; organized labor, 20 percent; newspapers and television news, 24 percent; the presidency, 26 percent.

Congress did even worse - 9 percent approval - in a Rasmussen Reports survey released last week.

As he sat in the stands at a high school gym awaiting a recent Obama event, retiree Walt Duka of Fairfax, Va., cheerfully put an upbeat spin on his current doubts. He's excited and optimistic about Obama and categorized himself as "one of the 84 percent of the people who think we are going in the wrong direction."

At 70, a veteran of previous national ups and downs, Duka said he's never seen the nation as down as it is now.

"I think we are in a war shouldn't be in. The economy has great problems. And the emphasis has been on helping the wrong people, people who generally don't need help," Duka said.

Though optimistic about what Obama can do as president, Duka acknowledged that the Democratic candidate has inspired "great expectations" that could lead to disappointment because of how long it could take to get the country moving in the right direction.

(Optional add ends)

In this political year, both sides have embraced boilerplate responses to low approval numbers. White House aides are now well-practiced in responding to questions about President Bush's low numbers, Yeah, they say, but the Democratic Congress has even lower numbers.

Yeah, say the Democrats, but it's the president's fault.

"Any time, I repeat, any time you have a president that is down so, so far in poll numbers, it drags down a city council member," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters last week. "It drags down any elected official, including us, and we recognize that."

GOP presidential candidate John McCain says a pox-on-everyone's-house sentiment prevails.

"The lesson I have from traveling around this state and around this nation is (voters) say, 'Why don't you guys stop fighting with each other ././. and sit down together and start addressing our issues?' " he said last week in Warren, Ohio. "That's why the approval rating of Congress is at ././. all- time lows. That's why over 80 percent of the American people think the country is on the wrong track."

At Democrat Barack Obama's campaign, where change is the message, the bad numbers can be good news.

"These polls reflect the many challenges our nation faces today – a war with no end, a dependence on oil that threatens our future, schools where too many children aren't learning and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can," said campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro, blaming it all on a "failure of leadership."

However the numbers are spun, there is no doubt that gloom hangs over this campaign like a fog over London.

"In this election year these dismal findings have, of course, a huge significance," the Harris Interactive Poll said in a June survey that concluded that "more people than ever think the country is on the wrong track."

Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones said many of the numbers are "close to, if not record, lows."

"I think it's just, in general, the way things are going in the country. When the economy is bad people tend to take it out on the government," he said of declining confidence in institutions, adding, "It's not a good thing, but it doesn't mean the society is about to collapse either."

But it could mean a collapse for a political party. And it's usually the party in power that suffers most when the cranky factor is cranked up.

"It's a little different now in that we've got one party in power in Congress and one in the White House," Jones said. "In general, whoever holds the presidency gets more of the blame just historically."

Pollster Rasmussen said the November margin may be more important than who wins. What this nation needs, he said, is a ballot-box butt-kicking, the kind of landslide that leaves no doubt about the outcome – something absent since Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election.

"It builds confidence," Rasmussen said of landslides, "because you no longer have people talking about hanging chads and were exit polls right and the vote count fraudulent."

Ken Herman's e-mail address is kherman(at)coxnews.com