Does your US representative deserve to be reelected? Yes 29% / No, give new person a chance 63% (NBC/WSJ, 10/25-28)
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WSJ:
Mr. Obama's job approval fell to 42%, with 51% of respondents disapproving of his performance as president. That marked a drop in his approval rating from 47% in early October and 53% at the end of 2012.
At the same time, more Americans now view Mr. Obama negatively than positively, for the first time since he emerged as a national political candidate.
In all, the poll of 800 Americans captured an extraordinarily deep and widespread public distaste for the two political parties, those parties' leaders and the state of politics in the nation's capital...
"Americans are voicing their frustration at a Congress that cannot keep the government open for business and an administration that cannot get health care open for enrollment," Mr. Hart said.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the survey along with Democrat Fred Yang, described the findings as a "shock wave" that showed the depth of "anger and frustration with everybody in Washington."
Greg Sargent:
The political read on Obamacare among Republicans has for years been premised on the idea that the American mainstream views it as the unequivocal catastrophe and threat to American freedom that GOP lawmakers have long claimed it to be. It’s long been my belief that the middle of the country views the law in more nuanced terms, is willing to give it a chance to work, and sees it as better than the GOP alternative, which isn’t a serious alternative at all. Today’s findings — fewer than a third agree with the GOP view that the current problems reveal it as an unsalvageable disaster — would seem to be in sync with that.
Of course, if the website doesn’t get fixed by the end of November, and problems persist into the new year, all bets are off. In the long run, all that matters is whether the policy works.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Dana Milbank:
“Access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans,” she said in her opening statement. “So let me say directly to these Americans: You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”
This was a sneaky and dastardly thing for her to do: sneaky, because it wasn’t in the advance testimony she gave the committee, and dastardly, because in today’s Washington, any acceptance of responsibility is so rare that the Republicans — who were counting on her evading and deflecting — were caught off-guard.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) seemed not to have heard the secretary’s apology. “You’re now blaming it on the contractors and saying it’s Verizon’s fault,” she said.
“Let me be clear. I’m not pointing fingers at Verizon,” Sebelius said. “We own the site.”
HuffPost:
Members of Congress grilled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday during a House hearing on Obamacare's troubled rollout. While she faced some tough questions, not among them was one particularly persistent inquiry as to why Sebelius herself wouldn't enroll in a health insurance exchange.
The answer is pretty simple: "Because I'm part of Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan," Sebelius said. In other words, she already has affordable health insurance, provided to her by her employer, the federal government. The health insurance exchanges were not created for people in Sebelius' situation. They were created for the millions of Americans who did not previously have access to quality, affordable health insurance through their employers or through Medicare or Medicaid.
HuffPost Pollster:
The Pollster poll tracking model estimates a nearly eight percentage point lead for McAuliffe over Cuccinelli (44.0 to 36.4 percent) with Sarvis moving up to 10.6 percent, as of this writing. The McAuliffe trend line now shows a slight decline over the last week (from 45.4 to 44.0 percent) although the change is not big enough to be considered statistically significant (it falls well within the 95 percent confidence intervals plotted on the chart).
Gallup:
Despite the occurrence of major technical glitches with the healthcare exchange website in the weeks since it went live, Americans' assessments of the future impact of the healthcare law have not changed much since August. Americans remain more likely to say the law will make the U.S. healthcare situation and their family's healthcare situation worse rather than better. Roughly one in three Americans still believe that the law will not make much difference for their family.