Americans' 'confidence in leaders'

By Alan Fraser

A few trends in the latest "Confidence in Leaders" Harris poll indicate that the public is not being fooled. In spite of the extreme -- almost pathological -- anti-military bias of the mass media, 59% of the public has "a great deal of confidence" in our military leaders and only 9% have "hardly any confidence at all" in them.

That's a huge spread (50 percentage points) between the positive and negative. Furthermore, our military leaders have the lowest "only some confidence" rating (only 30% of the public holds such a lukewarm view) and the second lowest "hardly any confidence rating" (9% of the public). Pretty damn good...and well deserved. Suddenly some of us don't feel so all-alone.

What this also means is that regardless of what the agenda-media does these days, a lot of us don't pay any attention to them, which is borne out by the other portions of the survey. For example, the public's confidence in those running the television news, the press is extremely low. Only 13% have a great deal of confidence in the leaders of the press while 39% have virtually no confidence in them. That's about right. And it does not seem to make much difference which political party you are in. (see Table 4)

The press is one of five institutions whose leaders inspire a great deal of confidence in less than 15% of Americans. Lawyers, Congress, and Wall Street are at the bottom. Also of importance is this trend:

The biggest change since early 2009 is the substantial drop in public confidence in the White House. Those with a "great deal of confidence" have fallen by 9 points from 36% to 27%.

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There have also been declines in those with a great deal of confidence in colleges and universities (from 40% to 35%), organized religion (from 30% to 26%) and television news (from 22% to 17%).

There is an interesting phenomenon reflected in Table 4. Note the difference in the responses between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats show a much higher level of confidence than do Republicans in, with the exception of the military, all large institutions. According to these results, the only leaders in whom the Republicans (relative to Democrats) have more confidence are the nation's military leaders and the leaders of organized religion. And note which party seems to like the Wall Street fat cats more than the other. This also passes the smell test.

Alan Fraser is the father of a United States Marine. He can be contacted at alanfraser62@gmail.com