Things are getting ugly out there. So ugly, in fact, that pollster John Zogby says the word 'dark' is inadequate to plumb the depths of the country's mood.
"The public mood is not just dark. What's darker than dark?" Zogby said. "The mood is getting ugly."
The Reuters/Zogby poll released yesterday shows Bush plummeting to his lowest point in a Zogby poll -- 29 percent -- and shows Congress also in the crapper. Basically, the country is hyper-pissed.
Al Tompkins of The Poynter Institute mentions this survey in a column he wrote exhorting newspapers to do more stories about how much America hates Congress.
That's pretty boilerplate stuff. But what was really interesting was his story about a high school journalism class:
This Wednesday, I spent most of the day teaching a high school journalism class. I was struck by the outright display of anger and contempt the students had for President Bush. When I pushed harder to find out exactly what they were so angry about, they couldn't get very specific except to mention Iraq and use words like "hate" and "stupid." I have not seen anything like that since the '70s.
I have seen anything like it since before the 70s.
The anger is palpable and its consequences real. And it is why Democrats wringing their hands worrying about being called names by Republicans if they display some cajones on Iraq have little excuse for cowering in fear.
And it is yet another reason why Democrats need to make a maximum effort to recruit candidates to run against these Bush shills. Nothing is more disgusting than giving Republican incumbents a free pass when the mood of the country is near the boiling point.
Zogby and Reuters have developed this new index to measure that boiling point.
The Reuters/Zogby Index, a new measure of the mood of the country, dropped from 100 to 98.8 in the last month on worries about the economy and fears of a recession, pollster John Zogby said.
Supposedly, falling below 100 is a really, really bad mood.
I prefer subjective, anecdotal measurements. Like the Mother Index -- as in my Bush-voting, Fox-watching, Rush-loving mother who has been a Republican since Goldwater and has drank gallons of Kool Aid over the years. She told me last week she is against the war. Bush losing my mother means it's close to being just him, Laura and Barney.
But it's not just Iraq.
It's a health-care system that turns life and death into a crap shoot.
It's an economy teetering on the abyss.
About two-thirds of Americans think the value of their homes will stay the same or drop in the next year, and about one-third expect a recession in the next year amid a housing slump and credit crunch.
It's a sense that everything in our lives is made in China and painted with lead.
It's the feeling that should a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake devastate our lives and our communities we are on our own.