There’s a difference between wanting a president’s policies to fail because you’re opposed to them and wanting them to fail just because he’s on the other side. As Bob noted, most republicans actually support the policies Obama is proposing. They’re only opposing them because he proposed them.

Yes.

I have no problem with the concept of the opposition party. During the Bush era there were times that I wish the Democrats were more of one. It’s the intensity of it that bothers me . I hated Bush but I still wanted him to get Bin-Laden. I would think that there would be some matters related to the economy that these Republicans could work with Obama on. Even the Gingrich/Dole Republicans in the 90’s worked with Clinton. Their opposition at this point is at the psychotic level.

I wanted MOST of Bush’s policies to fail. I wanted that administration to fail in efforts to privatize Social Security. I wanted them to be unsuccessful in sustaining extraordinary rendition and blanket state secrets privilege assertions. I wanted their efforts to cut taxes for the richest Americans to fail. On a more nuanced level, I wanted the war in Iraq to “fail” in the sense of quickly becoming futile and leading to quick withdrawal (I supported the war in Afghanistan at first, until we invaded Iraq and it became clear what a morass the former was becoming).

I have no problem (and certainly don’t think it’s inherent racist based on the generality of the survey question) with Republican respondents wanting their political opponent’s generic “policies” to “fail.” That’s pretty basic two-party democracy. If they’d asked a more serious survey question (such as “do you want President Obama’s American Jobs Act introduced in September 2011 to fail”) then you have some potentially meaningful results.

A more interesting set of questions would have been to have the SPECIFIC policies connected with the President’s name (which doesn’t seem to have been asked), and seen whether there was the same level of opposition as in the generic question. That might start to get at some underlying racism or something despicable. Asking someone generically if they want the leader of the opposing political party’s policies to fail doesn’t tease out that information, so sorry.

BTW, I want all of John Boehner’s policies to fail, regardless of the level of specificity. I guess that makes me an orangist, or something.

[W]hen Republicans are then asked about some of the Obama policy ideas themselves — without Obama’s name attached to them — majorities support them.

Not the least bit surprising. The same was true for the Affordable Care Act; when asked if they liked [X] or [Y] thing that it does, without mentioning that it does it, people were overwhelmingly in favor of it. Yet they were somehow “against” the Act as a whole. They weren’t against the real Affordable Care Act; they were against a fictitious law called “Obamacare;” you know, the one that had Death Panels™ in it.

This also puts the lie to the oft-cited claim that they don’t hate Obama himself, they just “disagree” with his “policies;” the fact is they have absolutely no idea what his policies are. The “policies” they’re against are the ones that exist in their own (and their preferred NewsCorp/ClearChannel employees’) paranoid delusions.

We are so f***ed.