Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell use Rasmussen's polling three times to make the political case against passage of healthcare reform. They use no other pollster on this question - just a generic CNN poll on attitudes toward government. I'm not surprised Fred Hiatt's latest anti-Obama gambit is to run this guff - Schoen just co-authored an op-ed with, yes, Republican Rasmussen, in the Wall Street Journal, and the WaPo's op-ed page is now essentially the WSJ's a few days' later, with a few torture believers thrown in as regular op-ed writers for good measure.
But the polling they cite is misleading. Rasmussen's current gap between opposition and support is some 13 points. The average of every other poll is 0.9 percent. Even including Rasmussen among every other polls shows that the gap is now 4.4 percent. And Megan thinks this places Rasmussen "in the middle of the pack". This is simply propaganda. It is untrue. And approval of Obama's handling of the issue is growing every day: