You can read a lot from a person by the way she interprets polls and when it's Rachel Maddow doing the interpreting, what quickly becomes apparent is repugnant.
On her MSNBC show Tuesday night, Maddow's take on the waning popularity of potential Republican presidential candidates in the states where they serve as governor conveyed more about her than the purported subject at hand.
Maddow began her inadvertently revealing monologue when she conflated Mitt Romney's two campaigns for president, which came after he finished a single term as governor of Massachusetts --
But if you're not, you know, running for re-election, Bobby Jindal's not going to run for governor again in Louisiana, just like, you know, I mean, if you're not doing that, if you are going to give up on your home state and instead run for president rather than trying to get your home state to elect you again, does it really matter if your home state hates you, right?
If your case to your party nationwide and your case to your whole country is that so far you have been a governor and on the basis of that experience as a governor you think you are ready to be president, does it affect your viability as a presidential candidate if the people you served as governor now hate your guts and think you've been doing a terrible job?
Politically it is kind of an open question. Mitt Romney ran for president after being governor of Massachusetts. He ran for president in part by telling the rest of the country and in particular Republicans around the country how much he freaking hated Massachusetts and therefore he was able to wear his own home-state voters' hatred of him as kind of a badge of honor. He ran Massachusetts and then while he was still governor, pivoted to telling the country how terrible it was to have to live and work in Massachusetts because Massachusetts was such a terrible state. Vote for me, Iowa! The last group of people who voted for me hates my guts now and I hate them back, those jerks. But it seems weird but Romney won the nomination with that argument. It kind of worked for him.
Wow, that's a whole lotta hate, even for a left winger, in not a lotta time. Oddly, Maddow provides no evidence to bolster the premise, not a single audio or video clip, perhaps deterred by the futility of finding any that would dovetail with her delusion.
As a resident of Massachusetts, she does bring a personal perspective to this. As a resident of the same state, so do I -- and what Romney did in the 2008 campaign when he first ran for president, and in 2012 when he ran again and won the GOP nomination, was to occasionally joke about the difficulties encountered by a Republican governing a deep-blue state. Romney saying how much he "hated" Massachusetts? Prove it, Maddow. And take your time, you'll need it.
After her two-minute hate targeting Romney, Maddow doubled down and did likewise for Republican governor Chris Christie, a perennial obsession, on the basis of a Quinnipiac poll. "And what they found is that Chris Christie, out of all the states they poll (which number all of nine, she previously stated), Chris Christie is definitely the governor who is more hated by his own constituents than any other governor," Maddow said. "Nobody has poll numbers as bad as he does within his home state."
This time around, Maddow deigned to provide evidence for her contention, or what passes for it with the low bar she sets. Here are the poll questions she mentioned and their results --
Do you think Chris Christie would make a good president (No, 65 percent; yes, 29 percent).
Would you say that Chris Christie is honest and trustworthy? (No, 52 percent; yes, 41 percent).
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Chris Christie is handling the state budget? (Disapprove, 59 percent; approve, 32 percent).
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Chris Christie is handling the economy and jobs? (Disapprove, 57 percent; approve, 34 percent).
Would you say that Chris Christie cares about the needs and problems of people like you? (No, 56 percent; yes, 41 percent).
Maddow then projected her own loathing for Christie from the results of the poll --
Chris Christie is despised in his home state, hated by his own constituents as a governor, believed by them to be not only disinterested in them as people but unsuited for the job of president of the United States.
Conspicuously absent from the questions cited was the only one that would provide a solid basis for Maddow's claim -- "Do you hate Chris Christie?" If she's the one running the poll, it surely gets asks, along with the obligatory followup, "Do you hate Mitt Romney?"
After showing Christie's attempt at spinning the poll's results in an interview on Fox News, Maddow's rant veered toward derangement --
So, Gov. Chris Christie and Gov. Bobby Jindal and a few others of these guys are going to give us a good test this year as to whether or not being hated by the people who know you best is as insurmountable a political hurdle as it would seem. As we await the results of that test, though, in the meantime we do now have, forever, for prosperity (or in perpetuity ...?) the thing that people will use, forever (and longer!) as a device for calibrating the machine that measures exactly how much (and forever!) fantastical self-regard it takes to do something like run for president. This will forever (cubed!) be the end of the number line in terms of how much these guys have to like themselves in the face of undeniable (and perpetual!) data that unequivocally shows them why they shouldn't.
Why don't they hate themselves as much as we hate them?!
Arguably the most bizarre rant I've ever heard on MSNBC, in an exceedingly crowded field of competition.
One need not work as a pollster to reasonably extrapolate from its data. Is is such a stretch to suggest that most of the disdain and disapproval of Christie among New Jersey residents comes from liberals like Maddow? Sure, there are conservatives who don't like him and probably a few who hate the man. But nothing compared to the vitriol he gets from the left -- as Maddow just demonstrated.
What makes this all the more perverse is that it emanates from a cable pundit who's ever so chirpy and ebullient, MSNBC's Ms. Sunshine. On nights like this, Maddow stumbles into uncovering what's actually within. Hers is the falsely uplifting voice streaming from the loudspeakers in the re-education camp.
