Hardball or Softball?

Is the U.S. meeting objectives in Iraq?

Report Card
Grade A	13%
Grade B	26%
Grade C	24%
Grade D	17%
Grade F	16%
Source: Council on Foreign Relations (June 1-13, 2005)
“Hardball” is silent as to whether the margin of sampling error for each individual question in the survey is +/- 4.0 percentage points, with a 95% level of confidence.		4%

On the Tuesday, ‘Hardball with Chris Matthews’ show for August 16, the following commentary about the above table. Chris Matthews posed the following question:

MATTHEWS: “We‘re back. Fighting here with HARDBALL political analyst Bob Shrum…here‘s a poll that was asked by the Council of Foreign Relations. Would you give the president A, B, C, a D or an F for his handling of the war? Most people don‘t give him an A, only 13 percent, or an F, only 16 percent. Most people give the president somewhere above a C and below a B. It‘s about, you know, 26 percent say B, 24 percent say C, 17 say D. It seems like the American people, Bob Shrum, are reasonably unhappy with this war but they‘re not ready to just pull the plug nor do they think it‘s a disaster. What do you think they think it is?

SHRUM: I think there‘s increasing disillusionment of the war. I think when you see number in the range of 40 percent approving of what the president is doing, 60 percent disapproving, you might average those out to some kind of C, although not in the school I went to.

Hardball? See the commentary to the following post at The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/2005/08/ratings-for-political-blo_5726.html

Is this hardball, softball, wackoball, or wiffleball?