Six percent

Six Percent:

Six percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in Congress. Can there be that many lobbyists?

Of course, only three percent express no confidence at all, which is better than I would have expected. Actually, the no-confidence numbers are mildly inspiring across the board: even in the case of the much (and often justly) maligned Bush administration, 93% of Americans express at least a little confidence in it.

That suggests that Americans still have faith in the system, just not in the current actors. As a whole, they believe that Congress is doing a terrible job, but that it can be fixed.

What is not obvious is how this harmonizes with the electoral trends for this year: the solution that Americans have intuited seems to be to give the ruling party in Congress even greater control; and at a time when none of the institutions of government are receiving popular support at any level, to vote for the party that wants to increase vastly government control over the economy (nationalize the oil industry! Universal health care!). Big business' numbers are not much better than Congress', but small business is #2 (after the military) in expressed confidence, with 28% of Americans having a great deal of confidence in it.

It is also noteworthy that "the police" enjoy such great confidence, while "the criminal justice system" does so badly. Americans like that they can call someone to have a criminal arrested, but are not satisfied with what happens to the criminal afterwards.

Gallup interprets the numbers as expressing a desire for "change," which is fine; but I think we can go further. Americans will take any change on offer, versus continuing the current system. But the change they would prefer is:

1) Keeping the military strong,

2) Helping the population start small businesses, moving out of public or big-business sectors of employment,

3) Law-and-order reform to strengthen the criminal justice system's ability to deal with criminality; I would think that a vastly increased use of capital punishment for violent crimes would be very popular.

Democratic candidates are running strong this year because Americans think of Republicans as being "in charge," even though Congress is in Democratic control. But the changes that people actually seem to want have little to do with what the Democratic party platform is proposing. Almost no one wants government to grow in importance; almost no one has "great" or "quite a lot" of trust in any of its branches.

A platform based on the three points above would likely win this year. There is still time for a strong expression of that platform: a pact, like the "Contract with America." It wouldn't matter whether it was the Democratic or Republican party that proposed the platform: they would gain wide support by it.

Furthermore, it's a platform I could support, regardless of the party that offered it.