'So Disgusted'
Reid, the Senate majority leader, and House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, yesterday offered competing plans to lift the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling and avert default. Lawmakers met to discuss the issue yesterday without a resolution.
Karen Miller, 59, stopped watching the news after negotiations stalled.
"I get so disgusted," Miller, 59, of Paso Robles, California, said in an interview. "What's the point of following it until they get close to the deadline?"
Many are paying attention as the minutes tick off toward the Aug. 2 set by the U.S. Treasury Department. Ben Keel III, a financial planner in Katy, Texas, said a client asked him yesterday whether he should convert his 401(k) investments into cash to guard against default. Keel said switching to cash isn't a good long-term strategy even though stock and bond prices may get hit temporarily.
"People are worried," Keel said yesterday in a telephone interview. "The debate is clearly causing some angst in the public."
Pinning Blame
The July CNN poll found that 51 percent of those surveyed would blame Republicans if the debt ceiling weren't raised, compared with 30 percent who would blame Obama.
"If this goes past a deadline and people feel the impact of that, then I think they will want to hold somebody accountable," Michael Dimock, associate director at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said yesterday in a telephone interview. The Washington-based nonpartisan center studies attitudes toward politics and policy issues.
Dimock said Americans, who generally believes the country's institutions have failed, will be swayed by only by the final product of the bruising arguments.