Stay Red Kansas – for­mer­ly the pro­pri­etors of Fire Kansas Democ­rats – is excit­ed. A recent Pew Poll showed, in SRK’s words:

over 40% of the pub­lic believe that the sit­u­a­tion is going ‘very well.’

Accord­ing to Pew, how­ev­er:

Four-in-ten Amer­i­cans say that the U.S. mil­i­tary effort in Iraq is going very or fair­ly well, up 10 points from Feb­ru­ary, when pos­i­tive per­cep­tions reached an all-time low.

That’s right, the “very” that SRK quot­ed should actu­al­ly read “very or fair­ly,” which is why the graph­ic SRK bor­rows from Pew is titled “Sit­u­a­tion in Iraq is going well,” not “very well.” That would be inac­cu­rate, since only 10% of the pub­lic think things are going “very well.” It’s also inter­est­ing that SRK presents a graph­ic show­ing three months’ data, not the one repro­duced here with results from the entire his­to­ry of the war. That con­text tells a dif­fer­ent sto­ry than SRK wants you to know. 

But it’s OK, because “Stay Red is nev­er one to get caught up in polling sta­tis­tics.” Nonethe­less, they feel oblig­ed to observe that:

Late­ly, the Amer­i­can pub­lic has trend­ed in a more pro-Iraq man­ner than any­time in recent memory.

We must con­clude that SRK needs some of Pat Robert­s’s mem­o­ry pills, because sup­port for our war in Iraq was high­er as recent­ly as ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, when 47% of the pub­lic thought things were going well (it was 37% in ear­ly Octo­ber, a sta­tis­ti­cal tie with the cur­rent measure).

SRK attrib­ut­es this unprece­dent­ed-in-the-mem­o­ry-of-small-dogs-and-brain-dam­aged-chil­dren pop­u­lar­i­ty to one pow­er­ful force:

the under­hand­ed deal­ings of Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi. As though her with­draw­al timetable was­n’t bad enough…

Hang on, that real­ly can’t be it. After all, 52% of the peo­ple in the same poll SRK is talk­ing about sup­port bring­ing troops home “as soon as pos­si­ble,” 55% sup­port set­ting a timetable, 63% think the esca­la­tion is mak­ing things worse or no bet­ter. Four in ten polled think Con­gress is not doing enough “in chal­leng­ing George W. Bush’s poli­cies,” and 59% want their mem­ber of Con­gress to back the Iraq sup­ple­men­tal that Pelosi pro­posed, “a bill that calls for a with­draw­al of troops from Iraq to be com­plet­ed by August, 2008.” Not only is sup­port for with­draw­ing troops grow­ing, sup­port for an imme­di­ate with­draw­al is grow­ing faster than sup­port for a grad­ual with­draw­al. If her plan to extract troops is unpop­u­lar with the pub­lic, it’s only because it’s too gradual!

I’m guess­ing his strong oppo­si­tion to Con­gress’s agen­da is why Pres­i­dent Bush’s approval rat­ings in Kansas are near their his­toric lows (cur­rent­ly 37%, low­est ever was 35%), and dis­ap­proval is one point below its his­toric max­i­mum of 61%. Her strong stance on Iraq is prob­a­bly also why Pelosi’s approval rat­ings are high­er than Hastert’s ever were (Pelosi: 37% in USA Today/Gallup, Hastert’s max­i­mum was 32% between 2/1999 and 10/2006, he left pow­er with 27% approval).

But Stay Red Kansas will hold his breath until he turns blue before telling you that.