Photograph by Kin Cheung/AP Photo

Pro-democractic legislator Claudia Mo Man-ching speaks next to a picture of President Barack Obama and Edward Snowden during a news conference in Hong Kong on June 14, 2013.

For all the political turbulence midway through the first year of President Barack Obama’s second term, public opinion of his job performance has held fairly steady.

Just under 50 percent — actually 49 percent — approve of the way Obama is handling his job, according to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center. Forty-three percent of those surveyed disapprove.

That’s three points lower than his job approval rating in January, two points higher than his rating in March and two points lower than his rating in May. Opinion has wavered within a five-point range since the start of the year, the latest results virtually dead-center in the middle of that slow pendulum.

In the meantime, the administration has weathered revelations about NSA surveillance of phone records and international Internet traffic, revelations that the Internal Revenue Service was screening Tea Party-related groups seeking special tax status and questions about the administration’s handling of the fatal attacks on a U.S. mission in Libya.

Pew says its June 12-16 survey of 1,512 adults finds that Obama is “likely benefiting from more positive perceptions of the national economy.”

“The share of Americans saying the economy is in excellent or good shape has doubled over the past year, from 11 percent to 23 percent, and is the highest measure since January 2008. Looking ahead, more say the economy will be better (33 percent) than worse (19 percent) a year from now. That is a reversal of economic expectations since March, when more said economic conditions would be worse (32 percent) than better (25 percent) in a year.”

Obama’s ratings on the economy, while mixed, also have improved, with 44 percent approving of his handling of the economy while 50 percent disapprove. “That is among Obama’s highest net approval ratings on the economy since his first year in office,” Pew reports. “Yet it is well below the 60 percent approval rating Obama received for handling the economy in April 2009.”

Original post is Obama Weathers Turbulence: Pew by Political Capital.

Photograph by Kin Cheung/AP Photo

A bus drives past a banner supporting Edward Snowden in Hong Kong on June 18, 2013.

Edward Snowden did good.

And Snowden should pay for it:

The results of another poll on public opinion about the former national security contractor’s revelations of widespread government surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic show appreciation for what the public has learned from the saga but little sympathy for the messenger.

Nearly half of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center — 49 percent — say the release of once-secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance “serves the public interest.”

And more than half — 54 percent — say the government should pursue a criminal case against Snowden, 29, who held a Top Secret clearance as a contract worker for Booz Allen Hamilton at his NSA station in Hawaii. The government already is doing that. Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong before the release, conducted an online chat yesterday sponsored by the Guardian, the U.K. newspaper that first reported on the government’s collection of telephone records from Verizon.

A poll sponsored by Time magazine found the same dynamic: Support but little sympathy.

Original post is Snowden: Appreciation, no Sympathy by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Russell Senate Office Building in Washington.

The public’s scorn for a Congress with a gridlocked agenda continues to grow, with a new Gallup poll out today showing American confidence in the institution at Congress as an institution is at 10 percent — the lowest level for any institution surveyed.

The poll found Congress dead last on a list of 16 institutions surveyed, from banks to the Supreme Court to the presidency. Congress came in right behind organized labor and health maintenance organizations.

Congress’s 10 percent rating in the survey is 3 percentage points lower than a similar Gallup survey of the public’s views of key institutions conducted around the same time last year.

Confidence in Congress reached a high point of 42 percent in 1973, and while it’s ebbed and flowed over the years it has largely in descent for a decade. The current level of 10 percent is the lowest level ever, and is in line with other polls by Gallup and other public-opinion group that show historically low approval ratings for Congress and its top leaders.

Gallup says that the public’s contempt is largely driven by the lack of action on key legislation at a time of split-party control. Both chambers are currently working to agree on terms of an overhaul of immigration law, an ambitious goal with an uncertain outcome.

Republicans took over the House in 2011, while the Senate has remained in the hands of the Democratic Party since 2007.

The institution with the highest rating in the poll is the U.S. military, with 76 percent of Americans expressing confidence. That is followed by small business, with 65 percent.

The phone survey of 1,529 U.S. adults was conducted June 104. It has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Original post is Congress 10%, Military 76% — Spectrum of Public Opinion by Political Capital.

Photograph by Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images

An edition of the South China Morning Post carrying the story of Edward Snowden on its front page in Hong Kong on June 13, 2013.

Edward Snowden has a lot of public support, it appears, for his leaking of once-secret information about government surveillance of domestic telephone records and international Internet traffic.

Yet not a lot of sympathy.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed by Time magazine say Snowden, a former security contractor for the National Security Agency and ex-CIA technician, did a “good thing” in handing NSA documents to the Washington Post and the U.K.’s Guardian newspapers.

Still, 53 percent say he should be prosecuted for the leaks.

Public opinion also is divided on the question of the surveillance programs themselves: 48 percent of those surveyed by Time approve, and 44 percent disapprove, a statistical tie in a poll with a 4 percentage point margin of error.

Most doubt the revelations will force the government to curtail the program, while 76 percent say they expect additional disclosures that the spying programs are bigger and more widespread than now known.

General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, has told Congress this week that the revelations will compromise the program — alerting targets to methodology that can be evaded with the disclosures.

His predecessor, Michael Hayden, who also ran the CIA, suggests that media coverage of the surveillance leak has “conflated” the work of the telephone screening with that of the Internet watching.

The orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act demanding phone records — such as the one demanding Verizon records over a three-month period revealed by Snowden — have collected the full run of records of calls made and their duration, Hayden notes.

The “PRISM” program involving the Internet has been targeted, aimed at foreign communications, Hayden said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today. That means that the government has ordered up the email or chats of someone in Yemen communicating with someone in another foreign country. The only thing American about this traffic, he said, is that it passed through a server in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft and other companies involved in the program have responded to specific and limited requests from the government, Hayden said — which corroborates what companies such as Google and Facebook have been saying, that the government does not have “direct” or “unfettered” access to their servers or their users email.

Finally, Hayden says, the program that President Barack Obama is running is basically former President George W. Bush’s program, with some expansions — Obama too has said publicly that while “scrubbing” the program he inherited, he also has broadened it.

All the significant reforms in the program, ensuring that secret FISA courts are monitoring the work, following revelations of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping in his Terrorism Surveillance Program were made in 2006, Hayden said, with restraints in telephone surveillance, and in 2008, with amendments to the FISA Act. Obama, he said, has widened the circle of members of Congress who are periodically briefed on it.

Which is interesting in light of the Time survey of 805 people conducted June 10-11, the two days following Snowden’s announcement that he was the source of the newspaper reports. Forty two percent of those surveyed said they see little difference between Obama’s care in respecting the privacy of Americans and Bush’s care — while 28 percent said Bush was more careful, and 25 percent said Obama has been.

Original post is NSA Leaks: Support, Little Sympathy for the Leaker by Political Capital.

Photograph by Eraldo Peres/AP Photo

Vice President Joe Biden during a joint-statement with Brazil’s Vice President Michel Temer at the Itamaraty palace in Brasilia, on May 31, 2013.

A couple of vice presidents past and present showed up last night at a Washington fundraiser.

The sitting VP, Joe Biden, a veteran of three-plus decades in the U.S. Senate, had some rough words for a couple of first-term Republican senators, the Tea Party-backed Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

“Think about this,” Biden said, as reported by the Boston Globe’s Matt Viser, covering the $250,000 fundraiser for Rep. Ed Markey’s Senate campaign. “Have you ever seen a time when two freshman senators are able to cower the bulk of the Republican Party in the Senate? That is not hyperbole.”

Biden, point man for the Obama administration’s gun safety agenda in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school slayings, said he had called 17 senators, including nine Republicans, to figure out why the Senate couldn’t pass a bill expanding background checks for gun-buyers.

“Not one of them offered an explanation on the merits of why they couldn’t vote for the background check,” Biden said. “But almost to a person, they said, ‘I don’t want to take on Ted Cruz. I don’t want to take on Rand Paul. They’ll be in my district.’”

“I actually said, ‘Are you kidding? These are two freshman,’” Biden added. “This is a different, party folks.”

President Barack Obama is bound for Boston today to campaign for Markey. Biden suggests that without Obama “at the head of the ticket” in the special election June 25, Democrats should not take that contest for granted — recent polling shows Markey with a narrowing advantage over Republican Gabriel Gomez.

“The last thing in the world we need now is someone who will go down to the United States Senate and support Ted Cruz, support the new senator from Kentucky — or the old senator from Kentucky,” Biden said, in ABC News take on the fundraiser this morning.

Vicki Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, was there last night as well. She told Biden: “Just one little word, Joe, if I could say: `You are like E.F. Hutton in this town. When you speak, people listen.”

As for Gore, who first was elected to the House along with Markey in the class of 1976 and won the popular vote for president but lost in the Electoral College in 2000, Kennedy said: “In my house we still call him president.”

“I want to make a direct admission here,” Biden said, in the ABC News account, pointing to the “Romney-rich” man who lost an election but made $70 million in a deal with Al Jazeera and $30 million selling stock in Apple. “I’ve been talking with Al for a while. I’m, quite frankly, just lobbying for a job, when I leave, with Al.”

Original post is Biden: Blistering Cruz, Paul — Wondering if Gore Has a Job for Him by Political Capital.

Photograph by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Former President George W. Bush shows three fingers for “W” as his wife and former first lady Laura Bush after the opening ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center on April 25, 2013 in Dallas, Texas.

George W. Bush is back.

In positive territory, that is.

Barely.

Not since 2005, the folks at Gallup say, have  more Americans held a positive view of the 43rd president than those who had a negative view.

Not until now:

Almost half of those surveyed by Gallup — 49 percent — have a favorable opinion of the former president in the latest survey. That’s slightly more than the 46 percent holding an unfavorable view.

Bush left office in January 2009 with 59 percent viewing him unfavorably and just 40 percent favorably. It got worse: By March 2009, public opinion was running 63-35 against him. His favorable-ratings recovered somewhat by 2010, settling in the mid-40s.

The June 1-4 Gallup survey released today marks the first time since an April 2005 survey that public opinion has favored Bush.

Bush has maintained a low profile since leaving office, Gallup notes — he’s become a somewhat accomplished amateur painter of puppies and pastoral scenes, taking up the hobby in retirement. His appearances around the dedication of his presidential library in at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in April are still fresh in the public’s mind.

Plus, Gallup says, the public tends to be forgiving about former presidents:

“The recovery in Bush’s image is not unexpected, given that Americans generally view former presidents positively,” Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones writes. “Gallup’s favorable ratings for Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all exceeded 60 percent when last measured.”

The June 1-4 survey of  1,529 adults has a possible margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Original post is Bush is Back: Positive Polling by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brooks Kraft/Corbis

The National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Most Americans – 56 percent – say the National Security Agency’s  surveillance of telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, the Pew Research Center reports today, while “a substantial minority” – 41 percent – see it as unacceptable.

And while the public is “more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, ” Pew reports.

Asked about the surveillance of email to prevent possible terrorism, 52 percent oppose that, which 48 percent support it.

The Pew Research Center and The Washington Post ran a survey of 1,004 adults June 6-9. The email question was asked June 7-9.

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed say it is more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if personal privacy is invades, while 34 percent say it is more important for the government not to invade personal privacy even if that limits its ability to investigate terrorist threats.

“These opinions have changed little since an ABC News/Washington Post survey in January 2006,” Pew concludes.

And look at the partisan breakdown: 69 percent of Democrats call it more important to investigate terrorist threats, even at the expense of privacy, as do 62 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of independents surveyed.

A Pew Footnote: The survey finds that while there are apparent differences between the NSA surveillance programs under the Bush and Obama administrations, overall public reactions to both incidents are similar. Currently, 56 percent say it is acceptable that the NSA has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls. “In January 2006, a few weeks after initial new reports of the Bush administration’s surveillance program, 5 percent said it was acceptable for the NSA to investigate “people suspected of involvement with terrorism by secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails between some people in the United States and other countries, without first getting court approval to do so.”

Original post is Public Supports Phone Surveillance, Divided Over E-Mail: Poll by Political Capital.

Photograph by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe/Pool via AP Images

U.S. Senate candidate Republican Gabriel Gomez, left, gestures during the debate, while Democrat Edward Markey listens, on June 5, 2013 in Brighton, Mass.

The Senate race in Massachusetts has tightened to single digits after a series of scandals caused Bay State voters to sour on President Barack Obama, a new Suffolk University poll finds.

The survey showed the Democratic nominee, Rep. Ed Markey, seven points ahead of Republican Gabriel Gomez. A May 9 poll run by the same university showed Markey up by 17 points.

“Recent Obama administration scandals, especially the Associated Press phone records scrutiny, have touched a nerve with likely voters who are holding back or no longer supporting Markey and President Obama with the same intensity,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, in a statement.

The president’s approval rating fell to 60 percent in the poll released today from 67 percent last month.

Obama plans to headline a rally in Boston for Markey on Wednesday.

The special election is June 25.

Markey is making little traction with his argument that Gomez would be beholden to Tea Party Republicans if elected to the Senate, the poll showed. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said Gomez wouldn’t be a “tool for the extreme right wing agenda.”

The poll of 500 likely voters was conducted June 6 to June 9. The margin of error is 4.4 percent.

Original post is Markey-Gomez Race Tightens: Obama’s Standing Cited in Poll by Political Capital.

Photograph by Lisa Krantz/San Antonio Express-News/AP Photo

A former female solder, who was sexually assaulted while serving in the U.S. Army, at her home in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Call it Accountability Day.

The Gallup polling organization held a press conference to explain why its 2012 presidential polling was off.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be asked to explain to a Senate Committee what he’s doing to halt what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel calls the “huge problem” of sexual assaults in the military;

A House panel will continue beating up the IRS over targeted reviews and overspending, and the EPA may begin to explain why it paid $750,000 a year for a warehouse that an IG report found stored a lot of “unusable, inoperable and obsolete furniture and other items.”

And speaking of being held accountable, Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham will be released from prison today in Arizona after serving more than seven years for accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors, AP reports.

Also today, the Brookings Institution holds a webcast with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on the global economic outlook. It’s the second day of the OECD’s international tax conference with speakers including Treasury’s Mike McDonald. The Roosevelt Institute holds a conference on its political agenda and approaches to jobs with Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Fed Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin.

The National Council of La Raza holds a discussion on immigration overhaul and the financial benefits of citizenship for U.S. Latinos at the National Press Club.

President Barack  Obama nominates three candidates for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, then holds meetings with Chilean President Pinera, who will later give an address at the NPC.

The Senate resumes consideration of the farm policy bill. The House takes up H.R. 2216, a $73.3 billion spending measure to finance military construction projects and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and the Uniersity of Texas hold discussion on leveraging natural gas to reduce emissions. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute holds a briefing on clean energy innovations and federal-state partnerships, with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. The House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus holds a briefing on the Energy Department’s clean-up program at Idaho Natl Laboratory.

The FDIC meets to consider a rule on which non-banks would be subject to agency’s Orderly Resolution Authority in event of collapse. A House Energy & Commerce panel holdsa hearing on home builders, with Louisiana-Pacific CEO Curt Stevens. Insight American Financial Services holds a Policy Forum on Capitol Hill, with speakers including Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., and JPMorgan Vice Chairman Alphonso Jackson.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers testifies before Senate Budget Committee on the fiscal and economic effects of austerity.

And the National Capital Planning Commission holds a public meeting on potential changes to height building limits in D.C.

 With assistance from Laura Curtis, Steve Geimann and Cary O’Reilly.

Original post is Washington Daybook: Accountability by Political Capital.

Photograph by Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images

Frank Newport, Editor in Chief of The Gallup Poll, in Washington, DC

Among the failures and successes of polling in the 2012 presidential election contest, the most noteworthy was the Gallup Poll getting it wrong.

Frank Newport, editor in chief of Gallup, has undertaken an examination of the methodology that led the longtime and esteemed polling organization to call the race for Republican Mitt Romney. He will hold a news conference this morning at the National Press Club in Washington to release his findings.

He rolled out a preview this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe:”

The biggest problem, Newport says, was the “screen” his organization used to report the results of its findings among likely voters. Gallup’s polling showed President Barack Obama winning among registered voters, and, of course, he did.

“We over-corrected,” Gallup said of the likely voter screen.

The inquiry, conducted with the help of experts at the University of Michigan,  also found three other problems:

– The sampling model used to select land-line telephones for dialing — they comprised 50 percent of the surveying.

–The manner in which people were asked to identify their race or ethnicity.

– Overweighted calling in certain time zones, the Central and Mountain regions.

Working with Michigan, Newport says, he is using the Virginia governor’s race that will be settled in November as something of a laboratory to ensure Gallup gets it right going forward.

Original post is Gallup’s ‘Likely’ Story: ‘Over-Corrected’ by Political Capital.