Susan Estrich is optimistic about our pessimism.

No, no… we’re not going to beat-up on her. Though, politically disagreeable we’ve seen her enough on the telly to sense that she is a pretty rational and sane observer of the body politic. Her article, (misplaced the link - will try to track down and post later), points to the “right direction/wrong direction” poll that was done recently as being good news for the eventual Democrat nominee. Said poll claims that 81% of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Not ones to ever be accused of overthinking things, this poll question never seemed to make a whole lot of sense to us, though, as it appears much more nuanced and subjective to interpretation than what the pollsters intended, perhaps. As such, we don’t know how we’d answer that question were it ever posed to us. Our reasoning would be a rather complicated algorithm to which generating a binary answer might prove impossible.

But back to Susan: Estrich hangs her hat on the CW that with an overwhelming majority of the American public being in a funk over the national “direction”, this spells trouble for the incumbent party in power….in the Oval Office. While this may be true, one’s got to think that the extraordinary job Congress has been doing as evidenced by their approval ratings has to be factored into this equation as well. It would seem to us that both Clinton and Obama as Democratic members of a Democratically-controlled Congress should be perceived as part and parcel reasons for our country-wide bummer. While this logic may hold for Clinton, Obama’s awesomeness lifts him above the fray.

B-Daddy, a while back, strongly urged the Republican primary candidates to run against Congress rather than their prospective Democratic opponent precisely because of this reason. Unfortunately for John McCain though, because of his track record in the Senate, we are skeptical that that he will be able to decouple himself from the overall unpopularity of the Senate and House.

Afterall, our disgust with Congress may equal that of a liberal’s, though for very different reasons which makes divining the effects of these polls somewhat sketchy.