Does ABC's Rick Klein read polling data?

Married to the GOP talking point about how Obama's gutting the economy and ruining Wall Street, the Beltway press remains borderline hysterical about the fact that Obama hasn't fixed everything already. Americans, though, aren't quite so irrational.

Here's Klein today in The Note perfectly parroting the GOP line (that's pretty much his job description):

On a political level, how long can the president muster the public support for his prescriptions, without tangible evidence that they're working?

If Klein bothered to read polling data, that exact question has already been answered. But we fear Klein and the rest of the press aren't going to like the results.

As Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight recently highlighted, the latest NBC/WSJ poll found that a strong majority of Americans (66 percent) won't begin to assign to Obama responsibility for the performance of the economy until 2010, and 43 percent won't until 2011.

The press ought to just take a deep breath before assigning blame. But with conservatives pushing their it's-Obama's-fault line of attack, we doubt journalists will be able to resist.