The first number listed in the CBS/NY Times poll when you look at the survey of the unemployed is Obama's job performance approval at 61%, including 57% on the economy. But there are more important things to come in this detailed look at what the unemployed think.
Roughly half of the respondents described the recession as a hardship that had caused fundamental changes in their lives. Generally, those who have been out of work longer reported experiencing more acute financial and emotional effects.
"I lost my job in March, and from there on, everything went downhill," said Vicky Newton, 38, of Mount Pleasant, Mich., a single mother who had been a customer-service representative in an insurance agency.
"After struggling and struggling and not being able to pay my house payments or my other bills, I finally sucked up my pride," she said in an interview after the poll was conducted. "I got food stamps just to help feed my daughter."
The human side is simply tragic. The NYT invited home videos, posted here, to hear directly from the respondents. Here's a written profile if you can't get video where you are reading:
In the last year, Evan Gutierrez, 29, has gone from administering a church’s good-will fund to applying to one so his family could pay the rent as he continued to look for work.
He had been working at a church and community center in Los Angeles, where he was the music director. He also helped dispense money for the church’s crisis fund. He was forced to leave in December 2008 when the organization’s endowment shrank precipitously in the stock market collapse. He was hired shortly afterward as a music teacher at a charter school, but it suddenly folded in March because of cutbacks in financing.
Naturally, jobs (29%) and the economy (27%) dominate the "what's important" numbers (health care and Afghanistan are next at 6%. This helps give some needed perspective to the health care debate, as the Senate dithers away on reform.)
57% of respondents think this is both a financial and an emotional crisis.
Want some politics with your breakfast? Click the graphic below. George W Bush is most blamed at 26 (Obama is at 3), and by 45-24, respondents answered that Democrats are more likely to create jobs over Republicans. The party ID from the survey is 20-33-38 R-D-I.
That's some Republican resurgence. Note also that among this group, the expectation is for jobs to get better (39) or stay the same (36), not worse (22) and 46% think jobs will come back. (In this survey, 60% of respondents have been out of work for less than 6 months, and 40% more.)
For those of you tearing your hair out over health reform, there are bigger problems in this country than Joe Lieberman's outsized ego. It isn't that he and the rest of the Senate is not helping on health care. It's that they're really not doing much of anything for anyone.