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Obama the Miracle Worker : Dick Cheney's Favorability Rating on the Rise

A politically-independent friend and former candidate for office in Delaware (legislature) has left me two incredulous messages in his own down-to-earth way saying :

"These guys (Obama et al) are starting to make Bush-Cheney look better and better."

Apparently he was closer than he thinks :

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As Dick Cheney prepares to give a major speech on the battle against terrorism, a new national poll suggests that favorable opinions of the former vice president are on the rise.

But the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Thursday morning, indicates that a majority of Americans still have an unfavorable opinion of Cheney.

Fifty-five percent of people questioned in the poll say they have an unfavorable opinion of the former vice president. Thirty-seven percent say they have a favorable opinion of Cheney, up 8 percentage points from January when he left office.

My friend has consistently shared my disdain and contempt for Bush-Cheney and the direction of the GOP under them, so he was not implying Obama makes them look good or any more palatable in their own right.

He is no blogger or political junkie or partisan or newsie or activist, but he does keep a close eye on the prevailing "narrative" (uggh, I hate that term and what it represents) and talks to many many "workaday" Americans every day.

His sentiment seems to be emerging that : "If you think Bush-Cheney had it wrong, Obama is shaping up far worse."

I think he sees that except for fluffery and pure rhetoric, we are getting with Obama the Bush-Cheney national security/police-the-world state PLUS trillions in profligate national statism touching not just on foreign or security policies, but EVERY aspect of our economy and our lives.

The fact that Cheney is now coming out swinging against Obama is all about defending himself and his administration from attacks (at least rhetorical) on specific Bush-Cheney tactics in executing neocon foreign policy.

Cheney should otherwise be hailing Obama's Bush-lite militarist interventionism, but I don't think he likes the idea of "Bush-Cheney Lite", especially not from Obama. (Neither do many of us, but for far different reasons than Cheney's).

My friend has always been a good barometer for the general mood out there (he is in a job that exposes him to 100's of people on a daily basis across almost all socio-economic lines) so I am sensing a growing fatigue with all the Obama duplicity...the "head swimming" (as Dana Garrett put it) reversals from Obama the candidate to Obama the president.

It should be of no comfort to the "Obama at all costs" crowd that he is making Dick Cheney a more favorable figure, amongst any Americans.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Maybe if Cheney had told us while he was in office instead of waitng until he was out that there was no connection between Iraq and Alqaeda his ratings would have improved while he was in office. Maybe everyone thinks he is about to tell us what he has been telling his daughter sbout how those enhanced interrogation techniques did save lives ... wait, wouldn't that be illegal to tell someone without a proper security clearance that which not even the Speaker gets to talk about, i.e., those torture techniques? Now he is going to tell us all if ONLY he could, dag nabbit, how those techniques worked. Come on, Dick, "You know the inside skinny. Tell us what no other medical or psychological expert will tell us, you brought someone to the brink of death 82 times in a 30 day period, and they gave up the secret plot to fly more airliners into US icons and their efforts were foiled, by George! Hey. if I really thought he was going to give us the irrefutable evidence that such foilings happened as he obviously has to his daughter, I might think more highly of him, too. But, wait Dick. I don't want you to violate those secrecy acts things like you did with Valerie Plame and get yourself in MORE trouble.

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