2016 Feb 17^th

Today we have “Morning Joe” once again making pronouncements that fail the “truthiness’ test. Joe claimed that the President’s approval ratings plummeted after the ISIS attack in Paris because he took no action. The immediate response to this comment is to ask if the President’s “inaction” really did lead to a reduction in his approval numbers; it did not. The President’s approval numbers are hovering close to 50 percent and have been there for some time. This number is more than a bit misleading because of the enormous disparity between the approval rating given him by Democrats, about 80 percent, and Republicans, about 14 percent. This gap is the largest for any President in recent times. Indeed the President’s approval rating was well below 20 percent when he first took office! This reflects the Republican’s outrage at his win and their well-known insistence that they would pass nothing of substance, so limiting him to a one term Presidency…that didn’t work very well for them.

No one on Scarborough’s program was willing to ask him what he thought the President should have done in response to the Paris attack. That’s not surprising because while I am not a consistent viewer, I have never seen any of his guest/co-hosts willing to contradict Scarborough to his face and thus risk their meal ticket. You notice quickly how the rules work: When Joe speaks everyone else shuts up…even if they are in the middle of a sentence. And Joe, himself, is never to be interrupted. That is the power that you can bring to your program when your guests are very well paid and you decide just who those guests will be. (Mika will do the occasional eye roll, but that’s the extent of any negative response to a bloviating Joe.)

Much is being made of the South Carolina bout of mud wrestling that now constitutes their primary election. The talk is all about Donald Trump and who can stop him. Unfortunately, for the Republicans, no one can stop him. Some of the discussion centered on why Trump can say anything he likes and keep his followers following, while Hilary Clinton’s followers seem more sensitive. I doubt that this has anything to do with the contestants; it is much more about their followers. I saw some interviewing done in a restaurant where the interviewees were two very suspicious older white guys. (The interviewer was from the “mainstream media” after all.) I didn’t see a single black face as the camera panned the restaurant during the interview. The same is true for most of the rallies. Look at Trump’s audience, at Cruz or Rubio’s audience. How many black faces do you see? South Carolina is 30 percent black. How many of them do you think will vote for Trump?

A final word: A very recent national poll has Cruz a couple of points ahead of Trump. That might be an outlier; poll results are, as the statisticians say, variables, hence they will vary. In a few days we will know if this represents a change in the voter’s preference or just a hiccup in the polling.