Lauren Mayer: Bipartisan Disgust Inspires Song — Congress vs. Colonoscopies

In this incredibly polarized political climate, it’s always refreshing to find areas of bipartisan agreement.  And a recent poll about congressional favorability ratings showed that liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, men, women, older & younger voters are all unified in their disapproval of Congress.  Nobody, apparently, thinks Congress is doing its job, and this sure seems like a great place to start working together to find solutions, since we’re all agreed about the problem.  Maybe this will help us dig our way out of the sequester mess, before Congress loses any more favorability (by some polls they’re already down to single digits).

I will leave the specifics of those solutions to trained political scientists and commentators, but meanwhile I was struck by one aspect of the poll. This time, instead of just tracking percentage approval rates, some brilliant pollster decided to put things in context by asking respondents to compare Congress with a fairly wide, weird assortment of things, so people were asked whether they viewed Congress or traffic jams more favorably, that type of thing.  And as many articles have referenced, Congress is less popular than a ton of fairly awful things, ranging from colonoscopies to Donald Trump – a list which was just begging to be turned into a song!