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CNN Poll: Ratings for Government Handling of COVID-19 Still Negative

reporter 1222 — Tue, 12 May 2020 13:05:14 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – Most Americans (54%) continue to say the US government is doing a poor job preventing the spread of Covid-19, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS.

And, while a growing share of the public feels the worst of the outbreak is behind us (44%, up from 17% in April), a majority (52%) still sees the worst on the horizon.

Four-in-10 Americans say that they personally know someone who has been diagnosed with coronavirus, a figure that has nearly doubled in the last month. And most say the government is not doing enough to address the growing death toll (56%), the limited availability of testing (57%) or the potential for a second wave of cases later this year (58%).

The new poll finds President Donald Trump’s overall approval rating holding about even at 45%. His rating now matches his high point in CNN polling dating back to the start of his term.

But at the same time, the President’s numbers for handling the coronavirus outbreak have worsened (55% now disapprove, up from 48% in early March and 52% last month), and only 36% say they consider Trump a trusted source of information about the outbreak.

Partisanship sharply divides views on nearly everything related to the virus, which brought an abrupt end to in-person social interactions and stalled much of the nation’s economy in March.

One of the sharpest partisan divides in the poll comes over where the US stands in the coronavirus outbreak. Republicans have made a 180-degree turn on this question since April. Last month, 70% of Republicans said the worst was yet to come, now, 71% say the worst is behind us. Among Democrats and independents, there have been more modest positive shifts, but majorities in each group still believe the worst is ahead (74% of Democrats, 51% of independents feel that way).

Roughly a third of Americans say they’re afraid about the potential for deaths from coronavirus to reach 100,000 or higher in the US (35%), and the same share express fear about a potential second wave later this year. About a quarter say they are frightened by the limited availability of coronavirus testing (26%), and roughly 1 in 6 say the same about shortages of basic food items (17%) and cleaning products (18%).

These feelings, too, are divided by party. Most Democrats say they are afraid about the possibility of a second wave (58%) or the rising death toll (56%), while among Republicans just 14% and 15%, respectively, feel the same way.

And partisanship splits the public on how the government is responding to the crisis.

While 82% of Democrats say the federal government is generally doing a poor job, 80% of Republicans say it’s doing a good one. There is nearly a 70-point chasm between Democrats and Republicans over whether the government is doing enough to address the potential for the death toll to rise to 100,000 or higher (81% of Republicans say the government is doing enough, just 13% of Democrats agree).

And there are differences of more than 60 points between partisans over whether the government is doing enough to address a potential second wave of cases (76% of Republicans say yes vs. 10% of Democrats) or the limited availability of coronavirus testing (77% of Republicans say yes vs. 12% of Democrats).

Some of the division in views of the virus may stem from a wide divergence in trusted sources of information about it. Republicans are more apt to say that they trust the information they get about coronavirus from Trump (84%) than they are to say they trust the information they get from Dr. Anthony Fauci (61%), the nation’s top infectious disease expert, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (72%). Among Democrats, just 4% say they trust the information they get from the President, well behind the 81% who say they trust Fauci or the 80% who trust the CDC. Overall, CNN (55% trust) inspires far more trust than Fox News (35%), with those figures also divided by party.

The virus has had a disproportionate impact on the African American community, and the poll finds a majority of black adults say they know someone who has been diagnosed with coronavirus, 54% say so compared with 38% of white adults and 36% among Latino adults. African Americans are also far more apt to give the government negative marks for its efforts to prevent the spread of the virus, with 79% saying the federal government is doing a poor job stemming the spread, compared with 55% of Latinos and 50% of whites.

The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS May 7 through 10 among a random national sample of 1,112 adults reached on landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

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Iran Will Never Start A War, But Will Defend Itself, Zarif Says

reporter 1222 — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 10:00:56 +0000

“There is a war going on right now. It’s an economic war — an economic war against Iran targets the civilian population,” Zarif told CNN in a recent interview.

He also noted that Trump is on the record saying “that he is not engaged in military war, but in an economic war,” adding that “economic war is nothing to be proud of, because, in a military confrontation, civilians may become collateral damage, but in an economic war, civilians are the primary targets.”

Asked about the possibility of a war with the US, Zarif said, “You cannot simply disregard a possibility of a disaster.”

“We’ve never started a war (and) we will never start a war, but we will defend ourselves and anybody who starts a war with Iran will not be the one who ends it,” he emphasized.

Tensions have been running high between Tehran and Washington since last year, when Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and unleashed the “toughest ever” sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Recently, the US has taken a quasi-warlike posture against Iran and stepped up its provocative military moves in the Middle East, among them the June 20 incursion of an American spy drone into the Iranian borders.

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) shot down the advanced US-made RQ-4 Global Hawk over Iran’s territorial waters off the coastal province of Hormozgan after the unmanned aircraft breached the country’s airspace on a spying mission.

The post Iran Will Never Start A War, But Will Defend Itself, Zarif Says appeared first on Iran News Daily.

FM Zarif says US has ‘addiction to sanctions’

reporter 1222 — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 08:30:54 +0000

In a Sunday interview with the CNN, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that the United States is addicted to applying sanctions on Iran.

“I believe there is a disease in the United States and that is the addiction to sanctions,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Sunday in an interview from Tehran with the CNN , adding that “even during the Obama administration the United States put more emphasis on keeping the sanctions it had not lifted rather than implementing its obligation on the sanctions it lifted.”

The interview is the first the key architect of the complex nuclear deal between Iran and the West has given to Western media since some of the US sanctions against Iran were renewed last week. The US-educated minister gave the interview in fluent English on the 65th anniversary of a US-backed coup that overthrew democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Zarif retained a clear belief during the hourlong interview in the foreign ministry that the nuclear deal could be revived regardless of the Trump administration denunciation of it.

The US President Donald Trump unilaterally and unlawfully pulled his country out of Iran nuclear deal back in May despite widespread condemnation across the world. Other signatories to the deal led by the three European countries have engaged in talks with Iran in a bid to keep it alive while facing huge US pressures.

Zarif expressed his dismay that the United States has not learned that sanctions are ineffective in changing the political climate in Iran.

“We felt that the United States had learned that at least as far as Iran is concerned, sanctions do produce economic hardship but do not produce the political outcomes that they intended them to produce, and I thought that the Americans had learned that lesson. Unfortunately I was wrong,” Zarif said.

He told that the same ’50s thinking embodied the current US approach. “I think the US administration still believes that it is working with the government it installed in Iran after the 1953 coup,” he said. “As they say, they have to wake up and smell the coffee.”

CNN website said that for much of the interview, Zarif appeared to dismiss the possibility of future talks with the Trump administration, and maintain the hope the deal can be revived. He said pressure from the European allies could persuade Trump to change his mind and accused the United States of ‘bullying’ the European signatories to the deal.

“We do not want to revisit that nuclear deal,” he said. “We want the United States to implement that nuclear deal. Today the closest US allies are resisting those sanctions. The US basically arm-twisting — its attempt to put pressure. I don’t want to use the term bullying … [but] that’s what it amounts to.”

Asked whether Iranian President Hassan Rouhani could benefit from a one-on-one meeting with President Trump — as Trump has preferred to tackle North Korea and Russia — Zarif said the previous nuclear deal had to be respected first. “Not when the previous huge progress that we made was thrown out,” he said of a one-on-one. “That [previous deal] was for us the litmus test of whether we can trust the United States or not.”

Would a lasting pact ever be possible with the man who wrote about the “art of the deal”? “It depends on President Trump — whether he wants to make us believe that he is a reliable partner,” he said. “Now if we spend time with him and he signs another agreement. … How long will it last? Until the end of his administration? Until he departs from the place where he put his signature on the agreement?”

Zarif said decades of pressure meant the Iranian people would be resistant to this pressure, yet it would have an impact.

“US sanctions have always hurt,” he said. “What it’s hurting, though, is people who want to buy medicine. People who want to buy food.” The United States denies it is targeting money that affects health care or agriculture, and says internal mismanagement and corruption are also to blame for rising food prices.

Zarif said the recent economic problems, which have seen the local currency slide and fruit and vegetable prices sometimes double, were due to preparatory measures being taken. “The economic upheaval that you see right now in Iran is because of the measures that needed to be taken to be prepared for those days, so we are prepared for the worst case scenario,” he said.

“We spent a lot of time” he said, of the yearslong, intense and detailed negotiations that he and then-US Secretary of State John Kerry led. “It was not an easy political decision for the Iranian government and for me personally and for President Rouhani. It may be a credit for some foreign ministers to spend hours upon hours with the US secretary of state but it’s certainly not a credit in Iran.”

Yet he accepted “that’s what diplomats are for. Part of our salary is to take personal hits for following national interests — that’s what our job is.”

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