Plurality of Americans see George Washington as greatest president

Mika Brzezinski's choice failed to make the cut.
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A plurality of adults agreed with Sarah Palin in a recent Rasmussen Reports survey, naming the first president of the United States as our greatest founding father:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American adults shows that 43% say George Washington is the greatest founding father of our country, up 11 points from last year. Thomas Jefferson comes in second with 24% who see him has the greatest found father, followed by Benjamin Franklin with 16%.

Just five percent (5%) see both John Adams and James Madison as the greatest founding fathers...

Washington has been at the top of this list since 2006.

Data released earlier shows that Americans continue to strongly believe in the nation’s founding ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. While most believe that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed, only 23% believe the federal government today has such consent.

In fact, 45% believe that the gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and politicians who want to rule over them is now as big as the gap between the American colonies and England during the 18th Century.

As usual, Gov. Palin is totally in sync with most Americans on the question. Clueless liberals had mocked the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate for choosing Washington, telling Glenn Beck in a in January, 2010 interview that she admired the father of our country because he refused efforts by some of his supporters at the time of the nation's founding who wanted to elevate the general to the status of royalty. Instead, Washington served two terms as president and then returned to his Mount Vernon home.

Most clueless of those clueless liberals was and continues to be MSDNC's Mika Brzezinski, who named Abraham Lincoln as her favorite "founder":

Ah, karma. In the middle of this MS-NBC gigglefest over Sarah Palin’s response to Glenn Beck on which Founding Father she likes best, Mika Brzezinski offers her opinion on the best Founding Father — who wasn’t born until 20 years after the US adopted its present Constitution.

Too bad the Civil War president was not there for the founding, as it occurred years before he was even born:

Lesson: Don't laugh at and mock someone when you are totally clueless about the subject.

Sadly, Mika doesn't seem to have stumbled over any clues in the last year and a half.

- JP

Rasmussen: Sarah Palin continues to close the gap

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Rasmussen Reports, in a survey taken four months ago, found that in a hypothetical presidential match up between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, the president would win by a six-point margin, 48 percent to 42 percent.

The results of a similar poll conducted November 24 show that Sarah Palin has cut Obama's lead over her by half. Now the president leads by a three-point margin, 46 percent to 43 percent.

That more recent survey by Rasmussen also provides us with a head to head match up on favorables, with Obama being seen favorably by 48 percent of the sample of voters, while Palin is viewed favorably by 46 percent.

Results of a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll released a week ago also show Sarah Palin's favorability ratings significantly improved over those measured by the same pollster in July.

- JP

Sarah Palin Rising: New Poll Results

As we noted Tuesday, recent Rasmussen polling shows Sarah Palin's favorability ratings to to be on an upward trend, despite a campaign by the hateful left and their trained media attack dogs to smear the former governor 24/7 for well over a year. The 2008 GOP vice presidential candidates favorables are, in fact, higher than President Obama's approval ratings.

The results of a new Opinion Dynamics poll conducted for FOX tend to confirm Scott Rasmussen's findings. The new survey shows that Mrs. Palin's favorable score among all voters has risen nine percentage points above July's mark of 38 percent.

Also among all voters -- not just Republicans -- Sarah Palin is viewed more favorably than her most likely potential rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:

Palin has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, along with a host of other Republicans. Among self-identified Republicans in the survey, Palin gets the highest favorable ratings (70 percent) amid a group of other possible contenders for the GOP nomination, including Mike Huckabee (63 percent), Mitt Romney (60 percent) and Newt Gingrich (58 percent).

Former Governor Palin's gains have come mostly from independents. Last July, more members of this key demographic group saw her unfavorably than favorably, by a 51 percent to 38 percent margin. The Going Rogue author has turned those numbers around. Now 49 percent of independents see her in a favorable light, while her unfavorables have dropped to 38 percent.

How has she manged to do this? We think it's too soon for Sarah Palin to benefit from the positive impression she is making on the general public with her recent television appearances with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters to promote her book. And before she made these appearances, she kept mostly a low profile except for expressing her opinion on a range of issues on Facebook. In time, Mrs. Palin's presence in both the new media and old will help to drive up her favorability ratings, but we don't believe enough time has elapsed for the improvement in her poll numbers to be attributed to the media blitz.

We think that Sarah Palin's rise in the polls is mostly a result of the boomerang effect. We have long predicted that the assault on her by the left and the media would reach the point of diminishing returns and would start to backfire on those who are trying to do her in. This is what we are seeing now. A clue can be seen in the Opinion Dynamics finding that 61 percent of all voters believe that Palin has been treated unfairly by the media.

As we have argued, independents have tired of hearing these below-the-belt attacks. They want substantive solutions to the problems that they had believed that voting for the Democrats last November would bring. The Democrats have owned Congress for three years and the White House for nearly a year, and things have gotten worse, not better. Obama and the Democrats in both houses have failed them, and independents are looking elsewhere for solutions. Sarah Palin is offering them common sense conservative proposals to get the country back on track, and they are willing to take a second look at her.

The delicious irony for conservatives in this is that those on the left who have using Alinsky methods in their attempt to destroy Sarah Palin have become victims of their own nefarious tactics.

Update: Allah says:

"Good lord — Sullivan’s going to have to take another few days off to cope with the data."

- JP

A Shout Out to Shannyn Moore aka Thelma and What's-Her-Name at Mudflats aka Louise

Hey Thelma and Louise, while you are down at the Progressive's for nutroots er netroots convention, you progressive/liberal bloggers should ponder this graph...



Rasmussen numbers

Support among Democrats is falling and the only Democratic support Obama will have left are the loony people like yourselves.

You do know how the story ends in Thelma and Louise don't you? They take the dive off the cliff right smack into the Mudflats...

- Tom