Jimmy Carter was elected President when the Real Sporer himself was a high school senior. Between the usual high school hi-jinx, much of the previous year was spent enjoying an unusual degree of political harmony at the Real Sporer’s birthplace. For the first time in my life, my parents both detested the same Presidential candidate. My Democrat father was an “any body but Carter” Democrat .and my Republican mother was terrified at what she described as “a hick Teddy, he’s nothing but a hick and he just cannot become President”. I think Fred W. allowed party loyalty to trump judgment and voted for Carter-but just once as he joined the majority in America’s overwhelming repudiation of the catastrophe that was the Carter Administration. Fred W wasn’t alone either, the Democrats ran Teddy Kennedy, only a decade removed from beating that murder 3 rap, in the primaries against an incumbent President and almost pulled it off.
Prior to today, I always assumed that Carter was a typical liberal, misguided but not evil. These are the people that I often liken to the pre WW2 “peace at any price” Western politicians, epitomized by British P.M. Neville Chamberlain. The common monikor is "useful idiot". Jimmy’s career has certainly been useful to America’s enemies so the real question goes to the judgment of objective history that Jimmy is an idiot. There has always been thought no rational explanation for Carter’s consistent historic support for the enemies of his own nation except complete weakness and naiveté But in his later years, Carter’s own statements might make him seem less idiotic and more a creature of cunning intelligence.
Yesterday, Jimmy Carter described the United States and Western Europe’s support for Fatah over Hamas in the Palestinian civil war as “criminal”. Bear in mind Jimmah made the statement in light of the violent blood bath by which Hamas seized power in Gaza. Moreover, the crime Jimmah alleges is the West’s refusal to support the Hamas agenda of exterminating Israel over the Fatah recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace in a two-state solution. In the strange world of Jimmy Carter there exists a principle that requires support of an actual terror state that serves as a client of Iran and Syria’s long term genocidal objectives.
Jimmah expresses some quite disturbing thoughts in recent tome, Peace Not Apartheid. It is almost impossible to read much of this one without seriously questioning the judgment of the author. The fact that the author once sat in the White House makes the reader actually a cringe at the thought of such a deviation of mentality wielding the power of the Presidency.
Carter served as a bridesmaid at the marriage of the Islamic terror jihad and more traditional 20th Century fascism, the Godmother of Islamofascism if you will. Carter’s refusal to support the modernist, pro-Western Shah gave birth to Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of Islamofascism. Every American since that time can thank Jimmy Carter for the world of today. When one looks back over the Jimmy Carter career one finds an almost unbroken stream of affinity with and legitimization of the world’s most brutal, radical, barbaric and totalitarian regimes. Read carefully, Carter provides special support for those who are most consistently anti-American voices in the global dialogue.
So perhaps it is time for history to revisit Carter’s reputation as an utter historical failure and open the debate as to whether his decades of diminishing America’s security while supporting anti-Americanism on a global basis were indeed the inadvertent acts of a bumbling historical anomaly or the calculated maneuvers of an utterly self-loathing American.
Prior to today, I always assumed that Carter was a typical liberal, misguided but not evil. These are the people that I often liken to the pre WW2 “peace at any price” Western politicians, epitomized by British P.M. Neville Chamberlain. The common monikor is "useful idiot". Jimmy’s career has certainly been useful to America’s enemies so the real question goes to the judgment of objective history that Jimmy is an idiot. There has always been thought no rational explanation for Carter’s consistent historic support for the enemies of his own nation except complete weakness and naiveté But in his later years, Carter’s own statements might make him seem less idiotic and more a creature of cunning intelligence.
Yesterday, Jimmy Carter described the United States and Western Europe’s support for Fatah over Hamas in the Palestinian civil war as “criminal”. Bear in mind Jimmah made the statement in light of the violent blood bath by which Hamas seized power in Gaza. Moreover, the crime Jimmah alleges is the West’s refusal to support the Hamas agenda of exterminating Israel over the Fatah recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace in a two-state solution. In the strange world of Jimmy Carter there exists a principle that requires support of an actual terror state that serves as a client of Iran and Syria’s long term genocidal objectives.
Jimmah expresses some quite disturbing thoughts in recent tome, Peace Not Apartheid. It is almost impossible to read much of this one without seriously questioning the judgment of the author. The fact that the author once sat in the White House makes the reader actually a cringe at the thought of such a deviation of mentality wielding the power of the Presidency.
Carter served as a bridesmaid at the marriage of the Islamic terror jihad and more traditional 20th Century fascism, the Godmother of Islamofascism if you will. Carter’s refusal to support the modernist, pro-Western Shah gave birth to Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of Islamofascism. Every American since that time can thank Jimmy Carter for the world of today. When one looks back over the Jimmy Carter career one finds an almost unbroken stream of affinity with and legitimization of the world’s most brutal, radical, barbaric and totalitarian regimes. Read carefully, Carter provides special support for those who are most consistently anti-American voices in the global dialogue.
So perhaps it is time for history to revisit Carter’s reputation as an utter historical failure and open the debate as to whether his decades of diminishing America’s security while supporting anti-Americanism on a global basis were indeed the inadvertent acts of a bumbling historical anomaly or the calculated maneuvers of an utterly self-loathing American.
42 comments:
Say what you will about him, Ted but Carter was a good man to have aboard if your canoe was attacked by a swimming rabbit.
Compared to W, Carter is looking like a genius.
"Every American since that time can thank Jimmy Carter for the world of today." - You may want to hit the history books again with an open mind. You are grossly oversimplifying history and looking at things through a very narrow contemporary partisan prism. Obviously Carter's term coincides with your impressionable youth, but you may want to try getting over that trauma.
Carter was a wise man compared to the miserable failure who now calls himself "Decider." Carter actually made some progress in the Camp David Accords: Egypt recognized Israel.
But Sporer prefers to call Carter an idiot, while Sporer praises the murderous Shah of Iran. How enlightening Sporer is!
Here's what I found on the internets:
"How the Camp David Negotiators Succeeded
"At Camp David, Carter showed a strategic sense, flexibility and sensitivity in his dealings with others that were not always evident in his approach to foreign policy. Shifting from the mediator role he first envisaged for himself, he became the chief diplomat in two simultaneous but in some ways separate U.S. negotiations with Israel and Egypt. He knew when to play the "U.S. relations" card, suggesting to both Sadat and the members of the Israeli team, as warranted, that should their actions blow up the conference, their relations with the U.S. would be imperiled. Three times he personally intervened, using insight he had garnered from a CIA report on the personalities of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to keep them from leaving the conference."
Read it and weep, Bushies.
Carter was a great president. I sure do miss things like Stagflation and the Misery Index. But hey, at least we knew the White House tennis court schedule.
REAL CLEAR BLOGS WEDNESDAY
Morning Edition
June 20, 2007
Debates & Discussions
JIMMY CARTER: DANGEROUS OR IRRELEVENT?
GTL | Michelle Malkin | Big Dog | Don Surber | Real Sporer
I miss the gas lines and turning my thermostat down and his recommendations to wear sweaters.
I miss the very high mortgage interest rates. I remember no one could buy a house at 28% interest rates. Carter did a bang up job on the economy. He banged it up pretty badly.
Thank GOD Reagan was elected to fix it all.
spotlight - if carter is so well revered, why did his own party try to depose him with Teddy, the drunken swimmer and serial womanizer, Kennedy?
What was going on? Educate us.
I miss not participating in the olympics. Great decision there Jimmy. What a disgrace that was.
Democrats, Republicans now almost equally likely to disapprove of Congress
by Joseph Carroll
PRINCETON, NJ -- The honeymoon phase is over for the new Congress, as the public's ratings of Congress are down again this month.
The latest congressional job approval rating (24%) is the lowest for the institution since Democrats took control of both houses in January, and is far below the 37% registered in February.
The decline has been most evident among Democrats, whose ratings of Congress now match those of Republicans.
Congressional job approval ratings are typically not positive, but ratings as low as the current one are uncommon.
It is unusual for congressional job approval ratings to be at or below 24%.
Congress has been rated this negatively only a few times in the four decades Gallup has measured this item -- in 1979, during the energy crisis; (CARTER'S ADMINISTRATION) at several points during the "term limits era" of 1990 to 1994; (NEWT LEAD THE WAY WITH THE REPUBLICAN TAKEOVER FROM 40 YEARS OF DEMOCRAT RULE) and last year.
Democrats' ratings have gradually declined in the past few months, falling from 43% in April to 37% in May and to 29% this month.
Wheel of misfortune
Arnaud de Borchgrave
June 19, 2007
The law of unintended consequences continues to throw up more consequences that were not intended.
Israel is now boxed in between three pro-Iran entities (Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas) and two pro-al Qaeda terrorist groups — Hezbollah that is dominant in Lebanon to the north and Hamas that now controls Gaza, the size of Washington, D.C., to the south.
Iran's radical assets in Iraq are biding their time. Benchmarks and timelines are not part of their vocabulary.
Iranian parliamentarians are not threatening funding cuts for the mullahs' Iraqi operations — or for their nuclear ambitions.
John Hinderaker has Irish TV news video of Carter’s appearance and sums up the visit: “So there you have it: in the perverse world of Jimmy Carter, the United States is a criminal nation that destroys civil liberties, tortures prisoners and oppresses Palestinians.
But the Iran-controlled terrorists of Hamas? No problem.”
Ed Morrissey adds:
Bush’s refusal to engage with a terrorist group — one that has long been on the State Department list of outlawed terrorist organizations — is “criminal”. Wouldn’t it literally have been a criminal act to engage with Hamas? Federal law prohibits such direct contacts and the transmission of aid to terrorist groups such as Hamas.
Even more ridiculous, Carter feels that we should applaud the organizational skills of a terrorist group that just murdered its way to the top of the Gaza power structure. He applauds their “superior skills and discipline,” while turning a blind eye to the ways in which they apply them. Rather than scold them for using violence to achieve their political goals, Carter wants the global community to welcome and reward them for it.
Leadership: In 1976, Americans thought they were sending an outsider to the White House. Today, the same policies so thoroughly discredited by Jimmy Carter's disastrous presidency define the Democratic Party.
Leadership: Of all the errors Jimmy Carter committed, none has earned him more well-justified scorn than his handling of the 1970s energy crisis. True enough, he didn't cause it. But he did make it much, much worse.
Diplomacy: It's often asserted that while Jimmy Carter's presidency was marred by error and incompetence, the peace deal he brokered at Camp David was an unmitigated triumph. Time to pop that bubble, too.
Let's start with the idea that Carter brought Sadat and Begin together. He didn't. It was Sadat who made perhaps the bravest gesture ever by an Arab leader, traveling to Jerusalem and speaking to the Knesset in 1977, a year before Camp David. It cost him his life.
Carter did provide Israel and Egypt with a venue — the presidential retreat at Camp David. Problem is, the pre-arranged "deal" was struck only after it was clear that the U.S. would give massive aid to both nations to keep them at peace. As Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis would later say, "Obviously, they needed someone to pay the bill, and who but the United States could fulfill that function?"
Even today, thanks to Camp David, Israel and Egypt are the two largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid — between $3 billion and $5 billion a year since 1978. Despite that, only one of the two nations can be called a friend.
Two years after Camp David, Sadat was murdered by Muslim extremists angry at the deal. And today in Egypt, there are no plaques of remembrance, no great monuments to Sadat. Only anger and bitterness
Even more important is what Camp David didn't achieve: a deal with the Palestinians. Carter failed to get his "friend," PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, to sign on to his vision for peace in the Middle East, though it meant autonomy for the Palestinians.
Why? "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel," Arafat said two years after Camp David. "We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations." Arafat never renounced those beliefs. And today, thanks to him and his terrorist brethren, the Middle East is as full of bloodshed and hate as it has ever been.
At best, Camp David was a modest diplomatic achievement — certainly not enough to lift Carter from his position as history's worst president.
Leadership: In foreign policy, Jimmy Carter proved his presidency the worst ever by subordinating U.S. interests to his vague "human rights" policy. All he did was enable dictators to take him to the cleaners.
Leadership: When men of strength are presented with difficult problems, their responses are firm and decisive. Jimmy Carter spent four years as president of the United States responding with weakness.
Leadership: On President Jimmy Carter's watch, more territory was lost to tyranny than at any other time since Yalta. And he'd have us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
Leadership: In the name of human rights, Jimmy Carter gave rise to one of the worst rights violators in history — the Ayatollah Khomeini. And now Khomeini's successor is preparing for nuclear war with Israel and the West.
Leadership: After being told over and over by President Jimmy Carter that America's ability to influence world events was "very limited," the Soviet Union believed him and invaded Afghanistan. And al-Qaida was born.
Leadership: When it comes to economic performance, there's no contest: Apart from the early years of the Depression, Jimmy Carter's brief tenure as president was the worst in the 20th century.
Leadership: When it comes to economic performance, there's no contest: Apart from the early years of the Depression, Jimmy Carter's brief tenure as president was the worst in the 20th century.
Leadership: So Jimmy Carter calls the Bush administration "the worst in history." This from the man who wrecked the world's greatest economy and made a nuclear Iran and North Korea possible.
What in my background qualifies me to deal with evil and bad men?” she had asked at the rally, rephrasing the question and then pausing before she and the crowd broke into laughter.
Sen. Hillary Clinton was booed again this morning at the Take Back America conference, sponsored by the lefty activist group Campaign for America's Future here in Washington.
At this same conference last year, Sen. Clinton was booed for her position on the war in Iraq. This morning, she was enthusiastically received as she bashed the Bush administration — "a stunning record of secrecy and corruption" — but the crowd became less friendly when, at the end of her speech, she turned to Iraq.
"We're going to end the war in Iraq and finally bring home the troops," she said as a number of Code Pink protesters stood up in the audience. When she declared, "The American military has done its job," boos began to be heard around the room. As the boos increased, Sen. Clinton raised her voice. "The American military has succeeded," she said, to more boos. "It is the Iraqi government that has failed to make the tough decisions." Still more boos.
Carter's Nutzpah
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 6/19/2007
Democracy: Has Jimmy Carter gone off the deep end? He's now scolding the West for refusing to bankroll Hamas terrorists who've just seized power at gunpoint in Gaza. It's a new low in coddling terrorism.
As the Gaza Strip flamed into Hamas gang warfare and the West Bank slid into another civil war, Carter — cozy in distant Ireland accepting another "human rights" award — found cause Tuesday to blame America first for all the violence.
Amid wine, cheese and good feeling, America's worst ex-president drew a bead on the West.
The refusal by the U.S., Israel and the EU to support Hamas, an armed terror group that just launched a coup d'etat and civil war in full view of the world, was nothing but a "criminal" act at the root of the trouble there, Carter asserted.
The statement was so malevolent and illogical as to border on insane.
Carter wasn't honest enough to say he was rooting for terrorists who started a terrifying new war in the region and trashed what little democratic rule the Palestinians had.
Instead, he tut-tutted the West for being insufficiently sensitive to the fact that Hamas thugs were democratically elected in 2006 in an "orderly and fair" vote.
When one party has started a civil war, democracy isn't exactly the issue anymore. Just being elected does not justify making warfare on your fellow citizens.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly points out that those who are elected democratically have an obligation to govern democratically or they aren't democrats. Hamas has blown its right to democracy.
Carter also misstated and distorted technical aspects of democratic rule in the Palestinian Authority itself, further calling into question his intentions. Hamas' 42% plurality in the last parliamentary election gave the terror group a right to participate in government, but not absolute power.
Carter neglected to notice that President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine's head of state, not only had a full democratic right to appoint Hamas members to his Cabinet, but he also had the right to dismiss them as he did Thursday. Carter's selective respect for the power-sharing aspect of Palestine's democracy stands out as significantly skewed toward Hamas.
Crazier still, Carter insisted Hamas was entitled to American aid because Fatah had been getting it. But he left out some details: Hamas is a terrorist organization that had broken six previous cease-fires, and its campaign platform vowed to destroy Israel. Hamas would gladly take Western cash to make good on that campaign promise to voters.
No one in the West is obligated to support an international terrorist organization just because it "won" an election. The proper response is to cut it off until it renounces violence.
For refusing to fund Hamas but propping up the slightly less unworthy Fatah, Carter charged the U.S. with trying to "divide the Palestinians into two peoples."
With such words, Carter can hardly be called a peacemaker. In fact, he should have been profoundly ashamed at his acceptance of his Nobel Prize. Ironically, his partner in peace, Yasser Arafat, got his stolen and desecrated by the very Hamas Carter defends. That ought to give him pause as he defends terrorists as democrats.
By George Will
Democracy is rule by persuasion, but the unpersuasive often try to coerce the unpersuaded.
Recent days have provided two illustrations of this tendency, both of them pertaining to labor unions, whose decades of declining membership testify to their waning power to persuade workers that unions add more value to workers' lives than they subtract.
Failing unions, like failing industries, turn to government for protection in the form of coercion.
Failing industries have traditionally sought corporate welfare in the form of tariffs (coercion of consumers).
Unions seek laws to confer what their persuasiveness cannot convince people to consent to.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 against the Washington Education Association (WEA), Washington state's teachers union, which was claiming a perverse government-conferred entitlement.
Five days later, organized labor and its political allies, including she who would be president, marched in Washington, D.C.
They were asking Congress to deny to workers, whom unions are trying to organize, the right to a secret ballot.
Both cases also illustrate the increasingly casual resort to abridgements of the rights of free speech and association
The Supreme Court has said that the card-check system is "admittedly inferior to the election process."
Hillary Clinton, who has given herself a makeover as a moderate, and who was elected by secret ballots, and who hopes that next year voters will use their secret ballots to give to her the power to nominate Supreme Court justices, nevertheless toes labor's line when she advocates abolishing workers' right to a secret ballot.
When in March the House passed card-check legislation for unpersuasive unions, a principal sponsor was Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who in 2001 wrote, with 15 colleagues, to Mexican officials, on behalf of the rights of Mexican workers, insisting "that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose." Now, that is persuasive.
Posted: December 20, 2006
Is Carter an anti-Semite?
Notes and thoughts on the question that's being pondered all around the American Jewish world: well, is he?
1.
First, about the question: What I chose to ask at the top of this piece is not merely a provocative headline meant to draw the attention of angry talk-backers.
It is a question that is now being discussed around every corner and in the halls of every gathering of the American Jewish community.
I keep hearing about people who debate this question, and was a witness to more than one such occasion.
Is it a legitimate question? Does it make the Jews look paranoid? Should one even ponder the idea of a former President as an anti-Semite? While I'm not sure what the answers to all those questions are, I am sure that they are already out there.
The Anti Defamation League was the most visible organization to argue publicly that Carter was getting to a point in which one could call him an anti-Semite.
Abe Foxman, always first to recognize the issue of the day among his fellow Jews, wrote to Carter that "In both your book and in your many television and print interviews you have been feeding into conspiracy theories about excessive Jewish power and control.
Considering the history of anti-Semitism, even in our great country, this is very dangerous stuff."
3.
But Foxman is not the only one that thinks Carter was getting there. At the reception for Natan Sharanski in the Israeli Embassy, I was surprised to hear the same argument from some people - Americans - who attended and debated Carter's motivations.
One of them said that he "never thought Carter was anti-Semitic," but that now he feels that Carter is "trying to rally Christians against Jews."
Somebody else told me that he thought "the true Carter is coming out now" and explained this by hinting that people "when they get older, tend to reveal what they really think."
In The fine line between hatred of Jews and political opposition to Israel, the State Department's first envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, Gregg Rickman, talked about the problematic nature of such definitions: "Where does the line fall between hatred of Jews and political opposition to, or even hatred of, Israel?
Rickman knows that in Israeli eyes, the difference is minimal.
Everyone is particularly sensitive when they are the ones being criticized, Rickman said, adding that some people consider anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism to be the same thing.
He will need to come up with criteria to determine what is permissible and what is forbidden, what is anti-Semitic and what is just political when it comes to Israel."
Apply the Eliot Cohen test to Carter and the results are mixed:
A. Obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews: About Israelis - most of them Jews - yes, but does it count?
B. Accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery: Not in Carter's book or appearances.
C. Having occult powers and participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments: As Foxman noted, Carter came close, but wasn't as detailed and as blatant as Walt-Mersheimer.
D. Systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group: If you count Israel as a "group" of (mostly) Jews - then, yes, Carter might be blamed for that.
E. Suppresses any exculpatory information: Oh, yes he does.
June 11, 2007; By David M. Drucker, Roll Call Staff
The Iowa Republican Party, which raises more than $1 million through its presidential straw poll, could be rescued by former Sen. Fred Thompson (Tenn.), whose entrance into the nonbinding but potentially significant contest would more than replace the money the state GOP appeared to have lost when presidential frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) announced last week that they would not participate.
A decision by Thompson to compete in the straw poll would be good news for Iowa's Republican Congressional candidates, who rely on the party's resources and infrastructure every election cycle. Thompson is expected to formally get into the presidential race shortly.
A well-placed Iowa Republican political operative said Friday that the Thompson campaign was in talks with state GOP officials about taking part in the straw poll, which is set for Aug. 11 on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames.
Thompson's participation would generate sufficient ticket sales to ensure the state GOP meets revenue projections for the event and doesn't experience a drop-off in its ability to bankroll voter turnout and influence Congressional and state legislative races next year.
"It's highly likely that Thompson will participate in the straw poll," the Iowa Republican operative said. "There are meetings going on as we speak."
The Iowa GOP depends on the straw poll, a quadrennial cash cow that often foreshadows the winner of the Republican presidential nominating caucuses, to raise somewhere north of $1 million for the party to use in funding ground-game operations throughout the state.
Mary Tiffany, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Republican Party, conceded that the absence of Sen. McCain (Ariz.) and former New York Mayor Giuliani -- as well as some lower-tier candidates -- is threatening to depress ticket sales and downgrade the amount of money raised by the event.
But Tiffany confirmed that the state GOP is confident that Thompson's participation would enable the event to match attendance estimates of anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 people.
There was no straw poll held in 2004, as President Bush was unopposed in the GOP primary. But in 1999, the state-fair-style event sold 37,000 tickets while drawing 40,000 people.
David Kochel, an Iowa adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney -- who also is considered a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination and is committed to competing in the straw poll -- said the money raised through the event is crucial to the state party.
Kochel, who served as executive director of the state GOP from 1995 to 1996, said the money raised from the straw poll in 1995 helped the Iowa GOP take over the state Senate in the 1996 elections.
The party's ability to play in Congressional races also is determined partly by how much money is raised via the straw poll, Kochel said.
"It's huge," he said, regarding the straw poll's impact on the Iowa GOP's operations.
Brownback told his staff of the decision today. "There are no coronations in America. The son of a Kansas farmer can still become President of the United States," Brownback says, "You don't declare yourself winner before the game is played. The people of Iowa will determine who wins."
Brownback says others have tried to bypass Iowa in the past and it's been a failed strategy.
Brownback says this is a test of organization, and the decision by Giuliani and McCain to skip the straw poll shows that both are out of touch with the base of the Republican Party.
The GOP took a beating in Iowa last year, but Hawkeye State Republicans say they are banking on a good haul from the straw poll to help them fund a comeback in 2008.
In 2006, Iowa Republicans lost the gubernatorial race and saw both chambers of the Legislature fall into Democratic control, with the 1st and 2nd Congressional districts also slipping to the Democrats.
Additionally, Democratic registration has risen three cycles running, with Democrats now outnumbering registered Republicans in Iowa for the first time in 12 years.
Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) appears well-positioned for re-election in 2008, with no high-profile Republican coming forward to challenge him thus far.
The Zogby Interactive poll of 8,300 adults nationwide finds just 3 percent of Americans viewing Congress's handling of the immigration issue in favorable terms, while 9 percent say the same of the president - even as respondents in the survey rated it the second most important issue facing the country, after the war in Iraq.
As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on an immigration reform bill in Washington, Americans said they take a dim view of that bill, with just 38 percent holding a favorable view of the legislation.
The poll also suggests that those most favorably-disposed toward the bill are those who view guest worker programs and a pathway to citizenship for those now in the country illegally as the most important aspects of the immigration debate.
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