Ed Morrissey:
This, of course, depends on how one looks at the data from the Washington Post/ABC poll Ilinked earlier today. The data on public perception of the VA scandal didn’t get much attention from the Post, but Business Insider’s Colin Campbell took a closer look at it and noted that the data on this looks overwhelmingly bad for Barack Obama. Eight in ten respondents assign at least some personal responsibility to Obama for the massive and systemic wait-list fraud that killed dozens of vets who couldn’t access medical care in Phoenix:
A new poll shows about 80% of Americans think President Barack Obama is “personally” responsible for at least some of the issues with the medical care provided to former soldiers by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The Washington Post-ABC News poll, released Tuesday, found 38% of respondents viewed Obama responsible for a “good” or “great” amount of the VA’s woes; another 41% said Obama was responsible for “just some” of the controversy. That makes for 79% of voters who lay at least some of the blame for the scandal with the president.
Soon-to-be Hot Air associate editor Noah Rothman uses the same calculation at Mediaite:
Given that this poll of adults has a 3.5 percent margin of error, it is conceivable that every American thinks this scandal is a real and urgent problem. The opinion that the scandal is “serious” is shared by more than 95 percent of almost every critical subgroup; Republicans, Democrats, independents, liberals, conservatives, moderates, women, men, minorities, young people – everyone.
What’s more, this poll suggests that the administration has not escaped culpability for the scandal. 65 percent of respondents said they believed former VA Sec. Eric Shinseki “was right to resign” over the allegations. While 41 percent say President Barack Obama deserves only “some” blame for the scandal, 79 percent agree that Obama shares fault for the fiasco at the VA. Only 20 percent believe Obama deserves no blame for the failure of oversight at an expanding list of VA hospitals.
Anyone who thinks the political operatives in the White House are not terrified by those numbers is kidding themselves.
The Post’s news report on the poll calculates this differently, although agreeing with Campbell’s math on the seriousness of the scandal:
The VA scandal, in contrast, shows no partisan differences and reflects growing public outrage at reports of lengthy delays for treatment and falsification of records at some veterans’ facilities around the country. The new poll finds a near-unanimous verdict, with 97 percent of Americans describing the problems as serious and 82 percent calling them “very serious.”
The White House has scrambled to get on top of the situation and so far the public appears to put the responsibility for the problems elsewhere than with the president. About four in 10 Americans say the president deserves significant blame for the problems that have mushroomed into a major debacle for his administration, while six in 10 say he personally deserves just some or none of the blame.
The difference here is what constitutes the threshold for assigning personal blame to the President. The question is asked in a traditional all-most-some-none polling format, and traditionally that gets aggregated with all-most/some-none. That’s the calculation used by the Post to get a 38/60 rating. That’s a defensible, if not convincing, conclusion to draw on the political impact of the scandal on Obama personally. And I’d bet that the political operatives Noah mentions are grasping at this analysis with both hands and perhaps a leg or two as well.
If Obama thought the Bowe trade was going to be a sufficient diversion from the VA scandal he’s going to have to re-think.
I just watched a video of a visit to an uncle’s (shared with one other man) VA hospital room.
Despicable!
The filth!
Floors covered in trash and dirty.
Trash cans full to over-flowing with medical and stinky waste.
Sheets dirty.
Room smelly.
There will only be more of these exposes.
Obama has made it nearly impossible for UNIONIZED VA workers to be fired.
And over 80% of all VA workers are UNIONIZED.
One of the things you learn early in the military or federal service rather quickly is that troops/employees do what the commander/supervisor checks. Obama has great difficulty checking anything while he is watching ESPN, flying all over in AF 1, playing golf and raising funds in Hollywood. He didn’t have time to make sure his people had adequate security or the veterans are taken care of properly. He did manage to get phones, food cards and contracts to those who would vote for him.
The real question is whether Ed Morrissey is smarter or dumber than most of the people who read his articles.
@Greg: That is where to buck stops Greg. It is difficult to make sure the government is working properly when you appoint people who have no experience in their jobs and you make no effort to make sure they do their jobs.
Greg,
That’s the way polls work.
If a poll asks do you ”completely,” ”very much,” ”somewhat,” agree with X, then ALL those responses count as agreeing to one extent or another.
You should know this.
Obama’s ObamaCare polls did the same thing to find that a ”majority” of Americans wanted ”reform” to our medical insurance system.
@Greg: It is a fact, Greg (or was, anyway) that the President/party in power at the time of bad things happening is held responsible for them. That was certainly true of the Bush administration, he being held fully responsible for the 2007 recession though very few to none of the “Bush economic policies” that “caused” the recession are ever able to be identified and linked to any cause and effect.
However, Bush was held responsible and, by extension, McCain and it cost him the election. People then, apparently, were not “smart” enough to see what the catalyst of the recession was; the dangerous twin bubbles of housing and finance created by a liberal, not Bush, economic policy, the Community Reinvestment Act. Despite this, Bush/McCain/every Republican then and now were held 100% responsible for the disaster and the continued inability to recover. Somehow, this administration has gotten a pass for most everything that has gone wrong (and that is a substantial list) on its watch.
Perhaps the VA scandal, with all the campaigning Obama did on it and then the lack of attention given to it, will be different and might open the flood gates of accountability on a myriad of other failures. People could just be getting sick and tired of weak, lame excuses and blame.
Boy!
Bowe really has pushed Obama’s bigger scandals off the front pages.
like this should be really big news…..
One on every four ObamaCare sign-up is so fraught with errors as to be rendered useless!
So, the ”8 million” turns into 6 million overnight!
OOPS!
That’s out of 330 million who could have signed up.
And out of 41 million who were supposedly waiting with baited breath to sign up.
@Nanny G, #5:
I think the problem with the poll is the totally differing takes respondents will have on the meaning of the word responsible. The question is so poorly worded that the break out of the various responses actually tells us almost nothing.