San Antonio Express
WASHINGTON — As Americans wait to see how many more U.S. Ebola cases will be diagnosed, a sharp partisan divide is developing around the issue of whether or not the administration is doing enough to stop the spread of the disease.
Particularly in the right-wing media, President Barack Obama is being blamed for the crisis. “PRESIDENT EBOLA,” the conservative Daily Caller site’s lead headline trumpeted Friday. Commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham have been hammering the theory that Obama has been remiss in not ordering limitations on travel from affected African countries to the United States — even though scientists have repeatedly insisted that such a move would be ineffective and probably counterproductive.
Conservative America’s regard for scientists’ pronouncements is not high — and, perhaps more to the point, neither is the regard for Obama, whose approval ratings nationwide are hovering around 40 per cent.
“But in the great swath of the South that includes … Texas, Obama’s (approval rate is) in the teens,” political scientist Cal Jillson of Southern Methodist University said Friday. “So nothing is too outrageous to say to good effect.” READ MORE