Please, you're not listening!

The other day, Bill Frist was on CNN and human Q-tip Wolf Blitzer presented Frist with a graph of poll data (r), which shows, apart from the occassional blip, a continual slide in congressional approval ratings from Oct. 2001 through May of 2006, where it now hovers around 25%. Twenty-five percent!

Blitzer then asks Frist this question:

Why do you believe the American public thinks the Congress, led by Republicans, has done a such a poor job?

To which Frist responds:

Well, I don't think we've done such a very job messaging what we have accomplished, even over the last year and half, when you look that we passed bankruptcy reform, class action reform, then we addressed the issues of decreasing regulations, some of the largest tax cuts in the history of this country, which take the burden off of small business. People don't know that a year and half ago we passed the first comprehensive energy plan, energy plan proposal, now law of the land, in fifteen years .... Securing America's values by having two Supreme Court justices go through that approval process just over the last year, secure America's health by, right now, people are beginning to realise it, now there's two and half years ago make sure that 39 million seniors today have affordable access to prescription drugs. I mention all that, 'cause that's what we're doin'; governing with meaningful solutions. You're exactly right, thought, that people are not listening and our messaging may not be quite what it should be.

For every "meaningful solution" Frist spouted out, I could almost see the approval rating dip five points. I doubt that Frist doesn't know that much of his listed "solutions" are things most Americans neither cared about nor had much interest in. And why should they? Those so-called accomplishments were designed or even written by the industries to which they were meant to cater. And Americans are apparently not so clueless about the meaning of those SCOTUS appointments, which are now visiting themselves upon the public. While Frist touts bankruptcy reform as a meaningful solution to a non-problem, can he really be unaware that most Americans just don't give a shit (though they should, because they could well become a victim of it one day)?

And yet bankruptcy "reform" was first on his list. It is further telling that his pride comes from limiting class action lawsuits, something that was also a gift to big business, and deregulation ... for big business. This is Frist's source of pride in "his" Congress. But to the tone deaf Senate leader, all those grand things that Congress -- or was it the busines elite? there is so little that seperates them these days -- did were visited by ever-decreasing approval ratings and that the only real problem was that the dumb-asses out in America-land just didn't listen to all the great things Congress had done; the messaging must be improved.

What might be Frist's next piece of legislation? I hear that the GOP Senate leader will soon introduce a bill that will require all Americans to listen to what Bill Frist tells them and that they will further be required, by law, to believe it.