One thing you can say about the Apparatchik Press -- er, the Associated Press -- is that it's leaving no stone unturned in its attempt to prop up their guy Barack Obama.
In the tenth paragraph of an AP report today by Ben Feller on President Obama's stack of priorities ("For Obama, big agenda and small window for results"), the wire service's Ben Feller bitterly clings to an AP-GfK Roper poll result that is sharply at variance with others, and assumes that it gives Obama a level of clout that doesn't exist outside the grounds of the White House:
Obama has a key edge in setting the agenda: public approval. His job-performance rating is holding mainly steady at 53 percent, while a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds that fewer people approve of Congress - a mere 22 percent - than at any point in Obama's presidency.
Well, of course his approval is 53% in AP-GfK la-la land. The poll's sample, as you can see at the top right (found at Page 31 of the 42-page PDF, consisted of 33% declared Democrats and 23% declared Republicans. The sample's independents who were willing to declare a leaning split evenly at 12% each, leading to overall party totals of 45% Democrat and 34% Republican. That's so widely and obviously at variance with what other polls are finding that it almost isn't worth documenting. But I will anyway.
AP-GfK has Obama at 53% approve, 46% disapprove (Page 3 of the report).
Gallup has Obama at 46% approve, 45% disapprove today. That's a 6% difference in the approval margin compared to AP-GfK.
Rasmussen has Obama's approval numbers during the past week at 43%-48%, and his disapprovals from between 52%-56%. Today's figures are 44% approve, 54% disapprove -- a 17-point swing from AP-GfK (from +7 to -10). Rasmussen has the party affiliation as 35.1% Dem and 32.1% GOP, a difference of 7 points from AP-GfK's 33%-23%.
But the most telling approval result relating to Obama's popularity was found in Missouri on Wednesday, when "The Show Me State temporarily became the No-Show State on Wednesday as some prominent Missouri Democrats decided they'd rather be somewhere else when President Obama came to push his massive health care overhaul plan."
It would appear that Obama's fellow party members aren't as convinced that the AP's cooked polls are reliable as Ben Feller is.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
