(Mark your calendars: RealShare New York Oct. 12 in New York.)
NEW YORK CITY-Last week, GlobeSt.com asked readers to weigh in on the debt ceiling debacle that had been gripping the country and that was later cited by Standard & Poor’s as a reason for the downgrade of US credit to AA+.
Readers were asked, “Which debt ceiling faction do you support?” with the following choices: “Obama has the country’s interest in mind,” “Boehner’s fighting for the welfare of the USA” and “They’re both self-interested ideologues.”
The vast majority of respondents, 41%, indicated that they felt that both sides were to blame. Speaker Boehner took a slight lead over President Obama, with a respective 31% and 28% of support from readers.
In the ensuing fallout, polls conducted elsewhere have demonstrated that the majority of Americans, at 46% according to a recent Gallup poll, oppose the deal that was hashed out. And several surveys put Congressional approval rating as low as 14 percent.
As for the results of the GlobeSt.com poll, Peter Cohan, president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a marketing consulting and venture capital firm, says that he sees them as indicative of the frustration many Americans feel over the attention sucked away from more pressing issues like jobs.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of people in this country who thought that the first priority of Washington ought to be creating more jobs,” Cohan says. “But cutting the budget will have the opposite effect.”
Cohan says the results--pretty much split evenly down the middle--show the fine line that elected officials must walk in order to keep from alienating their base, and that base’s cash.
“My conclusion is that the only way to survive in Washington is to keep getting those campaign contributions--and if you want to keep getting those campaign contributions you have to make sure that you don’t anger the people who are making the campaign donations,” Cohan says. “What you end up with is a situation where you can’t get reelected unless you get the money and as a result, that money ends up talking louder than any political speech.”
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