Several pundits have declared the point so obvious that it became instant conventional wisdom: Democrats on the Hill want to hold the administration accountable through oversight, but the public doesn’t care.<\/p>\n
David Broder said<\/a> there’s no political upside to the prosecutor purge scandal, so Dems should focus attention elsewhere. John Harwood and Brian Williams said Dems are risking a “backlash<\/a>.” Time managing editor Richard Stengel claimed that he is “so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove because it is so bad for them<\/a>, because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance,” adding: “That’s not what voters want to see.”<\/p>\n We’ve already seen some evidence that the media’s assumptions are misplaced<\/a>, but the closer one looks at the question, the more wrong the “backlash” argument becomes<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Democrats’ stepped-up pace of investigations has not drawn much in the way of negative reaction. Just 31% believe Congress is spending too much time investigating possible government wrongdoing, while slightly more (35%) say they are spending too little time on this, and a quarter believe that the time spent on investigations has been appropriate.<\/p>\n Republicans are more likely than Democrats or independents to say that Congress is spending too much time on investigating possible wrongdoing. Still, only about half of Republicans (48%) express this view, while nearly as many say Congress is spending too little time (24%), or the right amount of time (20%), on investigations.<\/p>\n In addition, more independents say Congress is spending too little time on investigations than too much (by 39%-29%). Roughly the same number of Democrats as independents say Congress is devoting too little time to investigations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In some ways, I suspect some congressional Dems have considered the past couple of weeks a toe-dipping exercise — if they cautiously start to investigate alleged administration wrongdoing, will the water be too hot? Will they feel forced to draw back?<\/p>\n Apparently not. Americans’ interest in accountability has been woefully underestimated. The water, in other words, feels fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several pundits have declared the point so obvious that it became instant conventional wisdom: Democrats on the Hill want to hold the administration accountable through oversight, but the public doesn’t care. David Broder said there’s no political upside to the prosecutor purge scandal, so Dems should focus attention elsewhere. John Harwood and Brian Williams said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}