From Forbes, by John Zogby

Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is in deep trouble with recent accusations of pedophilia. The wonder is that he is not in deeper trouble. The same polls that show his support in the December 12 runoff evaporating from an 11 point lead to a 4 point deficit following the accusations by women who were only teens when he allegedly abused them, reveal something greatly troubling about our two political parties and how their voters see the world. In the most recent poll, more voters (44%) say they are now “more likely” to vote for him than those who say they are “less likely” to do so (37%). To be fair, Alabama conservatives and Republicans are certainly not endorsing his alleged behavior. But they do seem to be rallying to his being victimized by the press, Democrats, the networks, the Washington Post (which broke the story), by the liberal Eastern Establishment. It is purely partisan selective moral outrage.

This is not new. We saw staunch defenders of President Richard Nixon until evidence made any defense completely untenable – as in tapes with his unmistakable guilty voice ordering a cover-up of the Watergate scandal. We saw it when Time magazine printed excerpts of Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, about the immoral behavior of President John F. Kennedy. The following week’s issue of the magazine printed two full pages of letters all essentially saying the same thing – “leave him alone, he inspired us”.

But things got decidedly worse during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Majorities of Americans never really endorsed the idea of the nation’s CEO having sex with an intern, and they were clear in my polls that they would not hire Mr. Clinton to babysit for them nor go out with their with their daughters. But the partisan divide over his impeachment was deeply dismaying. Dennis Duggan, the late Irish Catholic writer who spent five decades as a reporter and columnist for several New York newspapers, called me one day during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and told me he had just run into a nun with whom he had gone to school who told him, “so what if the President wants to get (oral sex) in the White House”. She also told him that Nixon was indeed a “crook”. In other words, bad behavior is okay if my guy is doing it. There are millions of excuses. It is heinous if someone from the other side is doing it.

There is something really deep going on here. I used to be able to ask a simple question about whether or not thing’s in the country “are headed in the right direction or are off on the wrong track”. It always gave me (and other pollsters) a good barometric reading on a sitting President. By the time President Barack Obama ascended to office in 2009, the question had become worthless. Democrats were far more likely to say things were fine, while Republicans saw things going to hell in a hand basket. It was pretty much the same thing with simple questions like whether or not voters saw themselves as “better off or worse off” than they were four years ago or if they believed their children would be “better off or worse off” than themselves. These questions became worthless among partisans. They were no longer producing results on the merits of the question.

We see lots of evidence of a breakdown of our two parties, and I have written a lot about the reasons. They are less seen as problem-solvers and more so as problem creators. The more they have become simply ideological, the less they are seen as realistic. But the problem is as much one that is our fault as we see our world only through the lenses of rigid ideologies. For starters, we have to stop being outraged only by the other guy’s behavior. Our guy may be just as awful.

Trump Report Card

From the Washington Examiner, by John Zogby

Foreign trips by U.S. presidents are supposed to be triumphant, exhilarating, and useful diversions from problems at home. President Trump’s trip to Asia is none of those. His dominant message of “America First” is not winning over Asians and his rhetorical “red line” with North Korea is, to say the least, not soothing to Americans nor citizens of everywhere else. Nor was it credible. Is he really going to bomb the Hermit Kingdom?

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump took an absolute drubbing at the polls this past week. The major victories by Democrats on Tuesday were clearly anti-Trump, anti-GOP as Democrats rallied their base, piled up larger margins in Democratic counties in Virginia, and picked up at least 15 new seats in the legislature. While Mr. Trump can claim that Ed Gillespie, the GOP nominee for Virginia governor was not “Trump enough,” fact is that voters selected the Democrat because of his support for Obamacare and his opposition to Mr. Trump. While the Democrats have time to blow themselves up, for now they may even pick up a Senate seat in Alabama.

Economic indicators are good, but there is no way to spin this into a good week for the president.

Grade: D

 

Wharton Business Radio Highlights:

The Analytics of Polling with John Zogby

John Zogby, Pollster and Founder and Senior Partner of John Zogby Strategies, joins host Anne Greenhalgh to discuss the art of polling and “Tribal Analytics”, which is his firm’s approach to predicting human behavior, on Leadership in Action.

Listen Here

Originally aired on Sirius XM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School

 

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