As I and others have noted, a great deal is riding on whether the American people come to believe the provocative idea — pushed hard by Dems in recent days — that Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the recovery to make it easier to recapture the White House. A recent Florida poll found that nearly half of Floridians believe this — perhaps the first to measure sentiment along these lines.

Now the new Post poll has asked a question that comes very close to measuring this sentiment on a national level — and it finds that half of Americans think Republicans are blocking Obama’s good faith efforts to fix the economy for political reasons [..]