Say Anything Blog

The bitter clingers are speaking up.

For the first time in a Pew Research survey, nearly as many people believe it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns (45%) than to control gun ownership (49%). As recently as a year ago, 58% said it was more important to control gun ownership while 37% said it was more important to protect the right to own guns.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted March 31-April 21 among 1,521 adults reached on landlines and cell phones, also finds public opinion about abortion more closely divided than it has been in several years. Currently, 46% say abortion should be legal in most cases (28%) or all cases (18%); 44% believe that abortion should be illegal in most (28%) or all cases (16%). Since the mid-1990s, majorities have consistently favored legal abortion, with the exception of an August 2001 survey by ABC News/Washington Post.

The proportion saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases has declined to 46% from 54% last August.

Neither of those results exactly squares with the idea of Obama and his fellow Democrats ushering in a new era of liberalism, does it?

Of course, I’ve been saying for a while now that Democrats haven’t been so much winning elections as getting elected by default as people disappointed with Republicans either switch their votes out of frustration or stay home and don’t vote at all.  Idealogically, the Republican party has become a vacuum.  The party stands for no definable policies or ideals, so they’ve lost the trust and support of a good chunk of the public.

But that doesn’t mean America has become more liberal.  As the abysmally low approval ratings of Congressional Democrats attests, not to mention the lower-than-you’d-expect approval numbers for Obama’s policies in general.