Posted on 05/20/2004 5:53:13 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Perry's approval rating lowest seen in 10 years
AUSTIN (AP) — More than half of Texans surveyed in a new poll rate Republican Gov. Rick Perry's job performance as fair or poor, the lowest for a Texas governor in almost a decade.
Only 6 percent of respondents in a Scripps Howard Texas Poll released Tuesday said the governor is doing an excellent job, and 31 percent said he is doing a good job. Another 32 percent listed Perry's performance as fair and 20 percent rated it as poor.
Eleven percent did not know or didn't answer.
By contrast, 50 percent of those surveyed in a Texas Poll in spring 2003 rated Perry's performance as good or excellent, with 44 percent calling it fair or poor.
The response compares to Ann Richards' negative reviews in November 1994, when 48 percent gave a thumbs-down to the governor who had just been defeated.
"He is in trouble," said Cal Jillson, a Southern Methodist University political scientist, of the governor. "He's seen as more partisan than thoughtful."
The telephone survey of 1,000 adults, conducted May 3-15, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Perry's press secretary, Kathy Walt, defended his performance, saying he has tackled tough issues such as almost $10 billion in budget shortfalls and the share-the-wealth school finance system in the past 18 months.
"The governor will continue to make difficult leadership decisions on issues important to Texans based on principles and not polls," Walt said.
A special legislative special session Perry called to overhaul school finance and reduce property taxes ended in failure this week.
Jillson said the governor hasn't had a victory since October's redrawing of congressional districts, which "was appealing to Republicans until they noticed all the blood on the floor."
"But now they're the ones who have left him, which accounts for most of his drop and is the more ominous thing for him," he told The Dallas Morning News in Wednesday's editions.
Among Republicans, the poll showed, 51 percent approve of Perry's performance, with his rating down 15 percentage points in the past three months.
"There's a shrill level of conflict in Austin that we haven't seen in a decade. It would suggest that even Republicans believe to some extent in bipartisanship and that both the conflict and the absence of perceived bipartisanship has unsettled the Republican base vote," political analyst Harvey Kronberg told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Wednesday's editions.
Also on the decline were job approval ratings of the GOP-controlled Legislature and other Republican leaders: Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Speaker Tom Craddick.
Polls like this, that conflate "fair" with "poor", drive me up the wall. When the hell did the English language get so tortured that those words are considered to be anywhere in the same ballpark of meaning?
"Fair" is "fair". That's still rather positive. If I were an employer, and my employee did a lousy job at something, I wouldn't yell at him, "You did a fair job, you moron!" Now, replace "fair" with "poor", and the sentence makes a whole lot more sense. Heck, even "mediocre" would work in that sentence? But "fair"? It sounds completely backwards.
Considering most people's generally low opinion of politicians, "fair" might be as high as they were ever willing to go, heh. I certainly don't see how anyone could say that they would NEVER vote again for someone who they saw as doing a "fair" job.
At least this article is up front about their manipulation in the first paragraph. The ones that make me want to exercise my 2nd Amendment Rights just on the off chance I get to meet one of these scumbags are the ones that lump "fair" in with "poor" and call it "disapproval" in the headline and you are never even -told- about it, instead left with the implication that the poll was phrased "approve/disapprove".
Qwinn
Gov. Perry would certainly earn "fair" marks from me, but I wouldn't vote for anything the democRATs might put up against him.
Governor Perry's Approval Rating Lowest Seen in 10 Years
Just a thought: Perry has only been in office 4 years. A little spin to make the numbers seem worse than they are. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 10 years ago our governor was Queen Ann.
Yeah, Perry's doing a crummy job; there's just a short list of people who would do an unimaginably worse job:
1. Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn (whew!)
2. Kay "Clueless" Bailey Hutchison
3. ANY Dimocrat
It's Bush's fault?
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