So I am on my Blackberry checking out news videos when I come across a video of George Snuffleupagus over at ABC news doing a story about how in their latest poll people trust Republicans more than Obama on 4 out of 5 key issues. Now the issue that Obama comes out on top is terrorism? Quickly the story becomes that this vindicates Obama’s handling of terrorism and the Pantie Bomber and so on. He goes on to give the numbers on all of the 4 other areas, health care, economy, jobs and the budget but doesn’t give the numbers for the terrorism, only saying Obama leads in this area and how it is such a vindication of his policies and how the GOP attacks have failed.
But there is a problem with people like me, when I watch or listen to the news, I listen for the part of the story that people are not giving me. Why didn’t they give the numbers on terrorism if this is in fact a glowing report card for Obama? If this vindicates everything he has done, which they listed it all, you would think they would give the number!
So I went digging and in fact if you go into the above article, they don’t give the number there either, only saying the same thing how he beats Republicans on terrorism. This is what it says in the article:
“The president’s rated negatively for his handling of four out of five individual issues tested in this poll: the deficit (56 percent disapprove), health care and the economy (53 percent apiece) and creating jobs (51 percent). His only positive is for handling terrorism.”
So where is this magical terrorism number that according to Snuffy makes Obama the terrorism warrior? Well you have to go into the PDF file of the poll and dig a little deeper.
http://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1102a22010Politics.pdf
There you will find that Obama does hold the advantage at 56% to 39%. However if you were to turn this into an approval index, which measures only the strongly approve 28% and the strongly disapprove at 25% you would find Obama only at a +3 points. This is not exactly a number one can tout as a complete vindication and agreement with everything Obama has done. In addition the poll was of 1004 adults, which is not the same as “Likely Voters”, and the reason they don’t use likely voters is because Obama always does worse among that group. That’s why they all slam Rasmussen polls, because they use “Likely Voters” which is more accurate.
This is just another way that the media, even when they have to report Obama is down in the polls, they are always trying to turn it around and make it some positive for Obama.
