Thread: Do Americans really care about the Comey firing?

Do Americans really care about the Comey firing?

POSTED AT 8:41 AM ON MAY 15, 2017 BY ED MORRISSEY


Official Washington certainly cares about the sudden firing of James Comey. The media has focused on almost nothing else, other than the series of shifting and fumbling explanations coming out of the White House about Donald Trump’s motivations for cashiering Comey. Given the high-profile nature of the position and the ongoing investigations into the 2016 election, one could assume that the firing would have Americans gripped by the latest developments.

And … one would be wrong, according to a new poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal. Almost a third of all Americans don’t have an opinion about it, and Trump’s approval rating has barely budged even in the midst of the “crisis.” And even among those who have kept up with the story, the firing gets a mixed response:

Just 29 percent of Americans say they approve of President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, while 38 percent disapprove, according to results from a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 32 percent of respondents don’t have enough to say on the matter.

Yet among those who say they have read, seen or heard “a lot” about the firing, 53 percent say they disapprove, versus 33 percent who approve.

The NBC/WSJ poll — conducted May 11-13, after Trump’s dismissal of Comey — doesn’t show a significant change in the president’s overall standing. Trump’s job-approval rating stands at 39 percent, which is one point lower than last month’s NBC/WSJ survey — well within the poll’s margin of error.

It’s not just Trump’s job approval rating that remained steady. His overall personal rating went from 39/50 to 38/52 since last month, statistically no change at all. Despite the massive coverage last week of the Comey firing, and the fact that this survey took place at the end of that week (Thursday through Saturday), nothing much has changed for Trump. This also jibes with a Gallup poll published on Friday, which saw a 39/46 split on Comey’s firing while also having no impact at all on Trump’s approval rating. “[F]or now there has been no change in public approval of the president,” the polling memo concluded, “which has been steady near 41% in the three days since Comey’s removal.”

How can that be? Well, for one thing, Comey himself isn’t terribly well liked — or known. He gets a personal rating of 18/26 in the survey, with more than half of Americans saying they don’t know enough to say. Comey’s not exactly a marquee brand, and among those who pay closer attention, not especially well regarded either, fair or not. That’s almost certainly because of the beating he took publicly from politicians of both parties, but especially Democrats since the election. National politicians have undermined Comey’s credibility, with Hillary Clinton taking the lead on that effort, and that left Comey without much political support at all.

But perhaps there’s a simpler explanation for the lack of impact. To put it bluntly: James Comey has nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. To them, this is a process story; someone got fired from a political appointment, and someone will eventually replace him. The FBI didn’t get dismantled, and neither did any of its investigations. It’s inside baseball, a Beltway story, and most Americans aren’t terribly interested in those stories. They want to see changes that fix problems and improve lives in their communities, and the volcano of hypocrisy that erupted from Washington DC over Comey’s firing reminds them of why they don’t care about process stories.

That doesn’t mean that Comey’s firing isn’t a legitimate story, or even a legitimate concern. At some point, the story may catch fire with Americans outside of the media bubbles. So far, though, the interest and outrage largely appears to be limited to the 202, 212, and 213 area codes — much like the media’s connections to voters in the 2016 election cycle.

http://hotair.com/archives/2017/05/1...tm_campaign=nl

I certainly don't.

I'm glad he's fired. It's such a relief. There's something very wrong with Jim Comey. He acquitted Hillary Clinton for obstruction of justice, mishandling classified information, and lying to the FBI. He failed to investigate the death of the 4 dead Americans in Benghazi, failed to investigate how terrorists in Tripoli knew the the location of a State Department Safe House many miles away in Benghazi. He failed to investigate the pay to play through the Clinton Foundation.

Yet, he prosecuted Martha Stewart, sent her to prison for 9 months, bankrupted her company, cost millions of shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars, and all for "lying to the FBI", because of a simple statement she made that she spoke with her broker, when it turned out his was his male assistant who answered the phone instead of her male broker.

Jim Comey ain't right. I'm so glad he's gone from government and hope he stays gone.

I really assumed that Trump would fire the FBI director when he came in, but mostly for the FBI's policy of obscuring "radical Islamic terrorism". The FBI as it existed was very much on board with the blithe fiction that the terrorism we see at the hands of Muslims had nothing to do with Islam.

I thought it was inevitable as Sessions as Attorney General.

It remains to be seen if the new FBI director is willing to get a grip on reality and see that the threat of terrorism coming from Islam as it is largely practiced in the world today.

I think he waited because he's so busy, and he wanted to have the Deputy Attorney General position confirmed since this is the person to whom the FBI Director actually reports. That person is Rob Rosenstein and he had just been confirmed about 2 weeks before the announcement of the Comey firing. I think Trump expected blow-back from the CORRUPT MEDIA, but I think he is truly surprised by the flip-flop and blow-back of DemoQuacks.

For me personally, the answer to the question in this threads' title would be no.