National Priorities according to the CBS.New York Times poll

Readers of this blog know that I have a regular feature called "Things I don't care about". If you listen to the Beltway pundits and the political noise machine, you might have a distorted view of the country's priorities.

According to the new CBS/ New York Times poll, these are the things Americans don't care about:

0% about terrorism

0% about defense

0% about energy

1% about abortion

1% about moral or religious values

1% about housing costs

1% about fuel costs

1% about the environment

1% about Foreign Policy

2% about immigration

3% about Education

3% about taxes

4% about the national budget (down from 11%)

7% about Government and politicians (our dysfunctional government)

9% about Healthcare/Medicare/Medicaid

22% about Jobs

22% about the Economy.

You would never think this if you listened to the war against contraceptives,the constant inveighing of the national debt and the calls for immigrants to "self-deport". In fact, there is little the GOP is discussing that is of any concern to the American citizen. No wonder they look like sheep wandering around without direction. No one cares about a single thing that have said.

What the PEW poll report and the recent Gallup polls report is that the original Obama coalition is coalescing basically in the numbers of 2008. The slight drop in white male support for the President is countered by a slight increase in white female support. But all the rest of the numbers are there. The interesting emphasis on Obama's so-called lack of white male voters neglects to mention that even now he is polling about 1 point above John Kerry's number and that Democrats have not received a majority of white males voters for a generation.

The major potential vulnerability remains the state of the economy around election time. And Mitt Romney's aides today said that once they got rid of Santorum they would stop talking about abortion and contraception. Clearly, the battle lines will be drawn on the economy. But the whole Republican primary has been fought on all the issues Americans rank either 0 or 1 or 2, not on any major concern of the American voter.