So apparently someone at Winthrop University is having election withdrawals.
Why else would they go out and poll South Carolina residents about politics? In a new survey released Wednesday, Winthrop revealed results of a phone survey that are, for the most part, monumentally unsurprising.
Only 48 percent of state residents approve of the job President Obama is doing – who knew? And 75 percent disapprove of the job Congress is doing. That seems a tad low. But maybe that’s because these people are evenly divided on whether Gov. Haley is doing a good job.
Ah, that explains it.
Those numbers, by the way, are subject to change once European hackers start using South Carolinians’ credit cards to buy mini Coopers and Russian porn.
The only real surprise from Winthrop’s poll is that 91 percent of state residents say they are certainly not members of the Tea Party.
Huh.
So why is it that less than 6 percent of South Carolina residents (a few didn’t answer the question) consider themselves members of the Tea Party?
Could it have something to do with the fact that clinging to a position of no compromise isn’t really a winning strategy in politics, which by definition is about compromise?
Might it have something to do with the Tea Party’s predilection for nominating loons in GOP primaries, which quite literally cost the Republican Party control of the U.S. Senate?
Nah. It’s probably just because their job is over. And, as a short but wise Jedi once said, “Go into exile I must. Failed I have.”
For all the talk about how the Tea Party was just about stopping government spending, for a good number of people the Tea Party was always about defeating President Obama.
If they were really so concerned with debt and spending, why didn’t they form years earlier, when President Bush II and his Congress took a budget surplus and turned it into a huge deficit? Probably because Glenn Beck – a guy so far out there that Fox won’t air his show anymore – didn’t tell them to.
Fact is, the Tea Party may have started as a quasi-grassroots movement but it was quickly appropriated by Republican fundraisers and operatives. But they couldn’t beat Obama. And now, as the GOP tries to drag itself into the 21st century, those folks are in the way.
So South Carolinians are distancing themselves from the Tea Party. And some people think this state is perpetually behind the curve.
In memoriam: