The "public confidence" game

Daniel Henninger:

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At the bottom of the heap, displacing HMOs as our worst institution, one finds the second branch of government, our Congress, at 12%. The Gallup folks noted it is "the worst rating Gallup has measured for any institution in the 35-year history of this question." Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, come on down! You've made history.

For my currently dwindling money, this chart says more about the real source of Americans' bad mood than the cycles of the economy. Markets come and go, but most people expect the nation's major institutions to serve as reliable bedrock. No longer, and that is what really has people down.

Voters this year may toss Republicans off the Capitol dome, but Democrats have next-to-no reason to think this is a vote "for" them. For what? The same dark tides could float Democrats back to sea in 2010's off-year election.

Americans desperately want their institutions to function, and it must appall them to see confidence in public schools at 33%, the ever-divided Supreme Court at 32%, and the courts with what is essentially a vote of no confidence at 20%.

Hard to miss as well is that just below the military's high-confidence interval comes, of all things, the cops. Alfred Hitchcock once said, "I'm not against the police, I'm just afraid of them." No longer. What the U.S. military and the police have in common is successful self-reform of their institutions. It helps that self-discipline, largely dying at every level of society (such as the 12% Congress), is a primary job requirement.

The bad economy may put Barack Obama in the White House. The remarkable enthusiasm for him, though, has more to do with the demoralizing loss of confidence in major institutions. This, more than his fairly conventional policy ideas, is the appeal of his "change" candidacy. Barack Obama is the Hey-Jude candidate, the man who somehow will "make it better."

Earth to Obama belief system: Don't hold your breath.

The reason Congress doesn't perform is that the two parties have drifted into basic ideological disagreement on the way the world should work. So has much of the electorate. Roughly, the Democrats, with the decline of the industrial unions, are now the party of the public sector. The GOP, fitfully but without doubt, is the party of the private sector.

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This polling is another example of how candidate favorability does not reflect voter preferences.

The top four categories are all institutions that the Republicans are more likely to support than Democrats. The bottom is an institution run by the Democrats, yet polls suggest they are strongly favored to increase their majorities. Why?

You see a similar disconnect on energy, taxes, and the war. Voters say they favor the positions the Republicans hold on those issues but they act like they don't know what either party favors when they give their party preferences. The GOP needs to figure out this disconnect and turn it around in the next few months.