If you haven’t noticed already, the polling about President Obama’s jobs proposal is very confusing. Ask people whether they like the plan as a whole, or how they rate Obama’s handling of the economy, and you’re likely to get a negative, or at best middling, response.

In last week’s CBS/New York Times poll, for example, only 34 percent of respondents said they approved of Obama’s management of the economy while 47 percent said they were confident the jobs bill would help. That was roughly the same percentage who said they weren’t confident it would help.

But ask people whether they like the elements of the plan and you’ll get a positive to very positive response. In that same CBS/Times poll, 52 percent favored giving more money to the states, 56 percent favored a payroll tax cut, and 80 percent (!) favored infrastructure spending.

Nor is that enthusiasm limited to Democrats. In Gallup’s latest poll, for example, 56 percent of Republican respondents said they supported using taxpayer funds to hire public workers and 50 percent said they supported public works, including school repair. (The numbers for non-Republicans, naturally, were higher still.)

That last result led Greg Sargent, who has been following this story poll by poll, to declare “this is just crazy.”