WASHINGTON, March 9 -- Most Americans still deeply distrust the Federal Government, despite the end of the cold war, the robust economy and the highest level of satisfaction in their own lives in 30 years, a new national survey has found.
Only 20 percent of Americans are satisfied with the state of the nation and only 34 percent basically trust the Government. Underlying both is a sense that politicians are corrupt, according to the survey released today by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
But even though Americans do not trust their politicians, two-thirds have a positive view of Federal workers and of many Federal agencies, according to the survey.
The Post Office is the most-favored agency, viewed positively by 89 percent of the people, up from 76 percent a decade ago. The least popular agency remains the Internal Revenue Service, dropping to 38 percent favorability from 49 percent.
But the generally positive view of particular agencies stands in sharp contrast to the negative view of the Federal Government as a whole.
Americans' dim view of Government has never recovered from its plunge in the 1960's, beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and continuing through the Vietnam War and Watergate, the Pew study noted. The public felt slightly better during the Reagan Administration, but that ended with the Iran-contra case.
Trust in Government hit bottom at 21 percent in 1994, when that sentiment helped Republicans win Congress for the first time in 40 years.
It has climbed 18 percentage points since then, but pollsters are divided over whether this represents a permanent turnaround or only a temporary uptick that could fall again again with new revelations in the sex scandal embroiling the White House.
[...] Mr. [Andrew] Kohut [director of the Pew Research Center] said that trust remained relatively low because the Government had failed to solve perceived problems like crime, drug use and Medicare and because politicians were being seen as corrupt. Many analysts said that the press, with its focus on bad news and scandals, had fostered this view.
Senator Fred Thompson, the Tennessee Republican who heads the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said the perception that politicians were corrupt was "the most serious problem we have."
"I assume they mean the old-fashioned money-type corruption," Senator Thompson said. Despite the concerns caused by excess money in political campaigns, that kind of corruption, he said, was "the one charge that I think we're probably not guilty of."
[D: as if!]