Gallop Poll-“Conservatives” Are Single-Largest Ideological Group

Despite what the step and fetch it media constantly tries to dispute, America is still a center-right country.

Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

These annual figures are based on multiple national Gallup surveys conducted each year, in some cases encompassing more than 40,000 interviews. The 2009 data are based on 10 separate surveys conducted from January through May. Thus, the margins of error around each year's figures are quite small, and changes of only two percentage points are statistically significant.

To measure political ideology, Gallup asks Americans to say whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. As has been the case each year since 1992, very few Americans define themselves at the extremes of the political spectrum. Just 9% call themselves "very conservative" and 5% "very liberal." The vast majority of self-described liberals and conservatives identify with the unmodified form of their chosen label.

Party-Based Ideology

There is an important distinction in the respective ideological compositions of the Republican and Democratic Parties. While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page -- 73% call themselves conservative -- Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal.

True to their nonpartisan tendencies, close to half of political independents -- 45% -- describe their political views as "moderate." Among the rest, the balance of views is tilted more heavily to the right than to the left: 34% are conservative, while 20% are liberal.

Gallup trends show a slight increase since 2008 in the percentages of all three party groups calling themselves "conservative," which accounts for the three percentage-point increase among the public at large.

Thus far in 2009, Gallup has found an average of 36% of Americans considering themselves Democratic, 28% Republican, and 37% independent. When independents are pressed to say which party they lean toward, 51% of Americans identify as Democrats, 39% as Republicans, and only 9% as pure independents.

Ideological tendencies by leaned party affiliation are very similar to those of straight partisan groups. However, it is worth noting the views of pure independents -- a group usually too small to analyze in individual surveys but potentially important in deciding elections. Exactly half of pure independents describe their views as moderate, 30% say they are conservative, and 17% liberal.

As reported last week on Gallup.com, women are more likely than men to be Democratic in their political orientation. Along the same lines, women are more likely than men to be ideologically "moderate" and "liberal," and less likely to be "conservative."

Still, conservatism outweighs liberalism among both genders.

The pattern is strikingly different on the basis of age, and this could have important political implications in the years ahead. Whereas middle-aged and older Americans lean conservative (vs. liberal) in their politics by at least 2 to 1, adults aged 18 to 29 are just as likely to say their political views are liberal (31%) as to say they are conservative (30%).

Future Gallup analysis will look at the changes in the political ideology of different age cohorts over time, to see whether young adults in the past have started out more liberal than they wound up in their later years.

Bottom Line

Although the terms may mean different things to different people, Americans readily peg themselves, politically, into one of five categories along the conservative-to-liberal spectrum. At present, large minorities describe their views as either moderate or conservative -- with conservatives the larger group -- whereas only about one in five consider themselves liberal.

While these figures have shown little change over the past decade, the nation appears to be slightly more polarized than it was in the early 1990s. Compared with the 1992-1994 period, the percentage of moderates has declined from 42% to 35%, while the percentages of conservatives and liberals are up slightly -- from 38% to 40% for conservatives and a larger 17% to 21% movement for liberals.

Horrible Obama Health Care

HOW OBAMACARE STRANGLES REFORM

WHILE Washington battles over President Obama's health-care scheme, real reform is under way elsewhere -- in places like Indiana, Utah, and Louisiana. Under the stewardship of innovative governors, programs in these states are giving patients more control over their own care -- and using the forces of free-market competition to lower health-care costs for everyone.

But Washington still matters -- because ObamaCare would crush these state-level initiatives.

Utah: Earlier this year, Gov. Jon Huntsman signed a series of reform bills aimed at reaching more than 300,000 uninsured Utahns. The centerpiece: a law letting Utah insurers offer cheap, no-frills plans exempt from costly state coverage mandates. The plans are less expensive than COBRA for people who've lost their jobs and an affordable option for the poor. Yet ObamaCare would end this effort: Utahns (and everyone else) would have to get insurance laden with "minimum coverage" requirements set in Washington.

Interest groups are already lobbying for their "treatments" to be covered -- everything from acupuncture to hair transplants. (No wonder Joe Biden is such a fan.) The baseline plans imposed by Washington would therefore be hugely bloated and way more expensive than Utahns want or need. But don't worry: Your federal tax dollars will make up the difference.

Indiana: The Healthy Indiana Plan, a Medicaid reform launched by Gov. Mitch Daniels to help cover low-income Hoosiers. Under HIP, each eligible adult gets a $1,100 account to pay for physical and mental-health services. The state kicks in most of the money; a small contribution based on the person's ability to pay makes up the rest. If the insured person doesn't spend all the money in a particular year, the remainder helps meet his share of next year's contribution.

HIP thus offers an incentive for people to be smart health-care shoppers. As a result, providers wanting to compete for HIP patients need to lower their prices, which keeps costs low for everyone.

ObamaCare will send HIP the way of the dodo -- because it will end up forcing Indiana (and every other state) to devote almost all their Medicaid funds to ensuring that everyone has one of those Washington-approved health plans. The crushing burden of "universal coverage" will leave states with no spare cash for creative reforms like Indiana's.

"A federal abolition of our HIP plan would be a cruel blow to low-income Hoosiers who now have very affordable health insurance that they control," says Gov. Daniels. "Any nationalized scheme that replaced it would be a huge step backward in quality and freedom of choice."

Louisiana: With about a quarter of its population covered by Medicaid, Louisiana ranks 19th among the states in total Medicaid spending -- yet consistently lands at the bottom for health quality. So Gov. Bobby Jindal is trying to move Medicaid patients out of the current system -- which simply pays doctors for the number of procedures they perform -- into privately managed insurance programs. The goal of Louisiana Health First is to give doctors incentive to keep Louisianans healthy -- rather than just rack up needless invoices.

But Jindal's plan would be another casualty of ObamaCare, which puts much greater control of Medicaid in federal hands. It's not even clear that the administration will grant Louisiana a waiver to launch the reform -- though such approvals have long been routine.

Jindal's health secretary, Alan Levine, notes: "When you take the incentive away from the states to be innovative and try new things, you lose the opportunity to get really good ideas from the people closest to the problems."

Just think back to Wisconsin's early-'90s welfare reforms under Gov. Tommy Thompson -- which eventually became a model for federal change.

The experiments under way in Utah, Indiana and Louisiana could meet with similar success. Competition among states to produce the most patient- and taxpayer-friendly system could even solve the health-care crisis without a national expansion of the welfare state. But if we get ObamaCare, we'll never know.

clyne.meghan, NY Post, 6/15/09

The Art Form of Doing Nothing

Doing nothing might seem to be simple and easy. But there are many varieties of nothing, and some kinds of nothing can get very elaborate and complex.

In courts of law, for example, “concurrent sentences” mean that nothing is being done to punish a convicted criminal for some of his crimes, since the time he is serving for one crime is being served concurrently with the time served for other crimes.

A study in Britain found that, among criminals caught, convicted and sentenced, only 7 percent of these sentences involved being put behind bars. Most of what is done in the other 93 percent of the cases amounts to virtually nothing.

People convicted of burglary in Britain are seldom jailed. For this and many other crimes, they will get a stern talking to. And, if they do it again, they will get an even sterner talking to.

The idea is that burglary is “only” a property crime and the left intelligentsia in Britain show their disdain for property rights by not taking property crimes very seriously. The net result is that burglary is far more common in Britain than in the United States.

Moreover, burglars in Britain seldom bother to “case” the place as most American burglars do before breaking in. Even if someone is home, that is far less of a danger in Britain where severe gun control laws greatly reduce the dangers to burglars.

A British homeowner who held two burglars at gunpoint until the police arrived was arrested — even though the gun he used turned out to be just a realistic-looking toy gun. The British intelligentsia take guns much more seriously than they take burglary, even when it is only a toy gun that is used to “intimidate” a burglar, as they put it.

People who say that we should learn from other countries seem to have in mind that we should imitate those countries. But some of the most valuable lessons from other countries can be had from seeing the disasters their policies have produced — especially when our own intelligentsia are pushing ideas that have already been tried and failed elsewhere.

We need to pay attention to these sneak previews of coming attractions, even if they consist of doing nothing. Whether in the United States or in other countries, the purpose of all this nothing is of course to pacify public opinion by pretending to be doing something.

The criminal justice system is not the only arena in which doing nothing is often common — and often gets complicated. On the international stage, the great arena for doing nothing is the United Nations.

We have, for example, been doing nothing to stop Iran from getting nuclear bombs, but it has been elaborate, multifaceted and complexly nuanced nothing.

Had there been no United Nations, it would have been obvious to all and sundry that we were doing nothing — and that could have had dire political consequences at election time.

However, thanks to the United Nations, there is a place where political leaders can go to do nothing, with a flurry of highly visible activity — and the media will cover it in detail, with a straight face, so that people will think that something is actually being done.

There may be televised statements and counter statements — passionate debate among people wearing exotic apparel from different nations, all in an impressive, photogenic setting. U.N. resolutions may be voted upon and published to the world. It can be some of the best nothing that money can buy.

Even when U.N. resolutions contain lofty and ringing phrases about the “concerns” of “the international community” or invoke “world opinion” — or perhaps even warn of “grave consequences” — none of this is likely to lead any country to do anything that it would not have done otherwise.

Iran, for example, has for years ignored repeated U.N. resolutions and warnings against building nuclear facilities that can produce bombs. There is not the slightest reason to believe that they will stop unless they get stopped.

Certainly doing nothing will not stop them — not even elaborate diplomatic nothing or even presidential international speech-making

Thomas Sowell, Naplesnews.com, 6/15/09