These polls pose a serious problem for the Republican leadership. The new conservative majority will contain up to 80 members who are in sync with the Tea Parties or who owe their seats to Tea Party support, making many of them among 21 percent who think that cutting spending is the single most important thing they can do in Congress. (Some of them have already said that they won’t even vote to increase the debt limit next year.) GOP leaders are going to have to balance this reality on the Hill with the opposing reality of a public that wants more than just budget-slashing—including compromise with the other side of the aisle.
Representative Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference and a leader of the congressional conservatives, recently opined that, “I don’t think the American people are electing a new generation to Washington, D.C. in the hopes that Congress and the White House can get along better.” Either this week’s surveys are all wrong, or Pence is. And the fact that he believes what he does means that we’re in for a bumpy ride until the American people blow the whistle on the new majority, just as they did when Newt Gingrich & Co. went too far in their confrontation with Bill Clinton.
It’s sometimes said that the president has the worst job in Washington. Maybe so. But, by next spring, John Boehner may conclude that being speaker is a close second.
Of course, the Republicans can stick to their guns, refuse to compromise, and guarantee...I'll say it again...guarantee Barack Obama's re-election in 2012.
And by the way, none of this excuses the American public's woeful listening skills during this election. The Republicans have been telling them over and over and over again that they won't compromise, yet the American public is voting them in with the expectation that they will. That, ladies and gentlemen, is sheer idiocy.
When someone tells you who they are, you listen. The American people haven't, and are about to get the Government they deserve.
The polling data is in the same article, which can be found here.
