NBC reporter Chuck Todd warned President Obama and the Democratic Party over the latest poll numbers released Wednesday morning, claiming they remind him of the American public’s famous “malaise” during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
The poll showed dismal poll numbers for the president, who seems stuck at around 40 percent approval — and a rapid slide in confidence for the future, with 71 percent saying the country’s on the “wrong track.”
“The numbers are daunting,” Todd told Republican pollster Bill McInturff and Democratic pollster Fred Yang. “This is a political landscape I don’t know that we’ve seen before. You try to historically mark it, 71 percent ‘wrong track’ — usually that’s Watergate, that’s Vietnam, that’s Iraq. But there’s no one event here.”
“[Former Carter strategist] Pat Caddell in, say, in 1978, might write a memo to a sitting president and use the word ‘malaise,'” Todd later continued. “I mean, I hate to bring that up, but that’s what this is. This is a funk. This feels like it’s going to take a long time to get the country out of this — I guess it’s a political depression now.”
Yang agreed that the depression was primarily political, not driven by a still-sluggish economy. “You know, I’m not sure I’d use the ‘M word’ yet,” the Democratic pollster said. “You know, we did find in our survey [that] two-thirds of Americans are happy with their lives right now.”