Rush Hits Pelosi Approval Rating

RUSH: All right, to the phones. Neil in Loveland, Colorado. Thank you, sir, for waiting and welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hi, Rush, mega dittos and thank you for all you do for us. You are it.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. Just one of the many forming the ‘consensus’ I refer to here. Thank you very much, Neil.

CALLER: All right. Well, the subject you’re talking about, Speaker Pelosi today is just incredible, and your morning update on her today got me inspired to call.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: I need your memory, but it seems to me that I recall the mainstream media started reporting job approval ratings for Speaker Gingrich.

RUSH: Yes, that’s true. They did.

CALLER: But I didn’t hear that on Tip O’Neill or I haven’t heard that on Speaker Pelosi, so are there job approval ratings for her? What are they?

RUSH: I haven’t seen any, but I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were somewhere down the road. They may be doing polls on it. The results aren’t what they want so they’re not releasing them would be my guess, but if they ever come back with an approval poll for Pelosi that is higher than Bush’s, I wouldn’t put it past them to put that out. What they’re doing now is rating ‘Congress,’ and you may have heard recently that Congress is up. Congressional ratings are up at around 40%. They used to be lower than Bush, but now they supposedly are up. From Monday: ‘The AP poll indicates the public wants Congress to push for an end to a war that has claimed the lives of more than 3,200 U.S. troops.’ Forty percent of those surveyed said they approve of the job Congress is doing. Now, how do you get from 40% of the…? Everybody knows what Congress is doing; they’re withholding funds and they’re trying to withhold funds, and the AP says here that the poll ‘indicates the public wants Congress to push for an end to a war.’ How can you say what the public wants when 40% of them is not a majority? Well, you can say it because you think your audience is a bunch of idiots. ‘Forty percent of those surveyed said they approve of the job Congress is doing. That’s up from 25% approval registered for the Republican majority in the weeks leading to the elections. The public opinion split is identical on the issue of Democrat handling of Iraq, 40 approve, 57% disapprove.’ Well, hells bells! How in the world can you get from 57% disapproval to the statement that the American people want Congress to get us out of Iraq?

CALLER: I don’t believe you can.

RUSH: You can’t. ‘Support is lower among self-described political independents, who deserted Republicans in last fall’s elections to give 57 percent of their votes to Democrats. Now, only 32 percent of them register approval of the job Congress is doing; 36 percent favor the way Democrats are handling Iraq. Even anti-war Democrats seem slow in warming to the new majority in Congress. While 59 percent of that group approve of the way their party is handling Iraq, 39 percent disapprove. Among Republicans, 86 percent disapprove.’ How in the world does any of this even get to 40% overall? (laughing) But beyond that, how does 40% come anywhere near speaking for the American people?

CALLER: It doesn’t.

RUSH: It doesn’t! So that’s what’s out there. As far as specific polls on the ‘Speaker of State,’ Nancy Pelosi, I have not seen any.

CALLER: Okay. Well, when you do, I’d like to hear them.

RUSH: Oh, we’ll pass it on when we get that, because I’ll tell you: be warned that when and if that day comes, it will be because she’s got higher individual approval numbers than Bush.

CALLER: Okay. So now it’s gotta be below 35.

RUSH: If they’re doing it, it’s gotta be below where Bush is, and that’s why they wouldn’t put it out.

CALLER: All right. Well, thanks so much, Rush.

RUSH: You bet, Neil.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I need to send out an APB for Neil in Loveland, Colorado, who we talked to at the beginning of the half hour here. He wanted to know if there were any Nancy Pelosi approval numbers, and I said I hadn’t seen any. Neil, there are approval numbers out there for Nancy Pelosi, and they are from the AP. Koko up at the website found this on a Washington Post blog with the blog post dated yesterday, and the headline is: ‘Pelosi’s Approval Takes First Hit,’ but not only that, she took her first hit because of me. ‘Under near withering assault from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has seen her approval rating suffer its first significant drop in her brief tenure wielding the gavel [as Speaker of State], according to a new independent poll. While she still remains more popular than President Bush…’ (laughing) I told you, Neil! This is the first one of these I’ve seen, by the way. ‘While she still remains more popular than President…’

You do a name recognition survey on Nancy Pelosi and let’s find out how many Americans can name her or can recognize her name, compared to President Bush. But anyway: ‘…Pelosi’s job approval rating dropped to 46 percent, according to an AP-Ipsos poll conducted in the middle of last week. Her disapproval rating climbed up to 44 percent, which is a sizeable shift from mid-January when the same poll had Pelosi’s approval-disapproval rating at 51-35. That mid-January finding held steady in late February, when the Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Pelosi’s job performance rated at 50-31 in favor of her. It’s certainly noteworthy that the AP-Ipsos poll was conducted during the peak of attacks against the speaker for leading a congressional delegation to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad. Those attacks included Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks on the Rush Limbaugh radio show…’

So, I am blamed along with Vice President Cheney for causing her approval numbers ‘to take a hit.’ (Laughing.) How many times when the Drive-Bys have reported President Bush’s approval numbers, have you seen it said, ‘It’s certainly noteworthy that the latest Bush poll was conducted during the peak of Democrat attacks on the president for X’? You never see that! The Bush poll numbers are attributed to the fact that Bush sucks. Bush poll numbers are attributed to the fact that Bush is an idiot, that Bush is wrong. Pelosi’s plummeting poll numbers are due solely to the fact that Cheney was on this show! You’ve just gotta love these people, in one sense. Neil, I’m glad you asked the question. I would have not known this. I don’t read the Washington Post blog, but Koko up there (with nothing to do, apparently, why else would you read it), went and found it.