What does "lack faith" mean to you? To me, it connotes the absence of faith. The null set of faith. An empty space, where faith once sat. I hate having to shine a light upon the semantically-challenged, but when when you have "some" of a thing, you do not "lack" that thing. Yet I'm reliably told by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen this morning that "nearly six in 10 voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country."
Let's look at the crosstabs!
See, it looks to me that the same percentage of respondents who "lack faith" in the president also "lack faith" in "the Republicans in Congress." And that is 29%, or approximately three in ten voters. "The Democrats in Congress," on the other hand, win the "lacking faith" derby, by three points.
Meanwhile, from stem to stern, the poll is packed with pretty bad news for the White House, all of which would have adequately underpinned a hype-garnering Washington Post story about "bad news for the White House." But for whatever reason, the reporters have taken the most disingenuous take on the numbers they could have possibly come up with and stuffed it into their lede.
At any rate, among American voters who retain the ability to put an abundance of confidence into ANYTHING that might "make the right decision for the country's future," the president is doing better than just about anyone else. That said, humans in America who can profess a "great deal" of confidence in anything these days are pretty inexplicable creatures.
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