President Obama’s first address to Congress was exceptionally well-received, according to opinion polls, focus groups and reportage across the country. For a good round-up of opinion polls and focus groups, check Pollster.com, where Mark Blumenthal cites a CBS News poll which found that 79 percent of viewers approved of the President’s plans for “dealing with the economic crisis” — up from 62 percent before the speech. Additionally, Blumenthal cites a CNN poll showing 68 percent of speech-watchers with a “very positive reaction.”
Blumenthal also reports on a DCorps dial-group of speech-watchers, and quotes TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg’s observation “I’ve never seen anything like it. Republicans never went below 50 [on their dial ratings].”
While most newspapers dutifully quoted from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s ho-hum rebuttal on behalf of the GOP as a concession to ‘balance,’ a quick survey of “second-tier” newspapers across the country suggests that Obama’s speech generally received a favorable reception from reporters and the public alike. For example, in Detroit, reeling from the meltdown like no other city, Obama’s address seems to have hit the mark. Todd Spangler reported in The Detroit Free Press :

Although not formally recognized as a State of the Union address because it came in the same year as his inauguration, the hour-long speech had all the makings of one and contained much of concern to Michiganders struggling with high foreclosure rates, plant closures and the highest jobless rate in the nation in December at 10.6%…The auto industry, he said, has been beset by “years of bad decision-making” and government shouldn’t protect the industry from “their own bad practices.” But he said it is too big an industry to fail…His commitment to the domestic auto industry is essential, said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat.

Miami Herald reporters Robert Samuels and Evan Benn had a man-on-the-street round-up, including:

At the Riverside Hotel on Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard, Rocco Norman watched Obama address the nation on television and said he was pleased to hear the president say he would fight corporate greed.
…”I’m a worker. Most everyone I know is a worker. And we’re scared for our jobs, while the CEOs keep getting bonuses? That isn’t right,” said Norman, 42, a law office assistant.
Obama’s remarks about the economy drew the attention of several Barry University students, who took time off from their studies to watch the address…”It rejuvenated the hope for me that our education system will be able to compete with the Chinese,” said Michael Whorley, an 18-year old freshman…’Usually, in economic turmoil, education is the first thing to go.

The Abilene Reporter-News featured AP white house correspondent Jennifer Loven’s wire report, which explained that the President’s address was more of a speech on domestic policy, but noted:

In contrast to many State of the Union addresses by George W. Bush, Obama did not emphasize foreign policy. He touched on his intention to chart new strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan and to forge a new image for the U.S. around the world even as he keeps up the fight against terrorism…He touted his decision to end the practice of leaving Iraq and Afghanistan war spending out of the main budget. “For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price,” Obama said.

The Portland Oregonian ran a well-titled editorial “More Braveheart, Less Cassandra,” which had this plaudit for the President:

The president, deprived by the electoral calendar of the chance to offer a true State of the Union speech this year, made the most of his opportunity to show America an air of confidence and competence. With stock indices down, job insecurity up, local governments planning service cuts and banks being seized weekly, nervousness has threatened to give way to panic. That’s why Obama sought to sound a reassuring note Tuesday night. And let’s face it, the president has a gift for persuasive rhetoric…Obama conveys the demeanor of a man who knows his history, can command attention and is mindful of peril. All of those qualities were on display Tuesday night.

The Omaha World-Herald went with a legislator round-up, “Reaction by the Midlands congressional delegation,” including the following observations:

Republican Senator Charless Grassley: “Beyond the policy debates, the President can do good by expressing confidence in the future and help to give Americans the fortitude we need to weather this economic crisis and come out of it stronger than we were before, as we have done time and again in our country’s 233-year history.”
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin: “The president’s economic recovery package, along with his plans for reducing foreclosures and stabilizing the financial system, will rebuild confidence and stop the downward dynamics in the economy. In the longer term, he is making investments that will restore growth and transform our approach to energy, health care, and education…he intends to move to rein in deficits once the economy recovers. The president made it clear, tonight, that he will continue tackling the fiscal and economic messes created in recent years with boldness and urgency. This will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Up in New Hampshire, even The Manchester Union Leader published a fairly positive account of the President’s address to Congress, observing,

The central argument the President’s speech was that his still-unfolding economic revival plan has room for — and even demands — simultaneous action on a broad, expensive agenda including helping the millions without health insurance, improving education and switching the U.S. to greater dependence on alternative energy sources.
Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., called Obama’s speech “interesting and inspiring.” “Obama showed that even when we disagree, we can produce the best results when we engage in the process in good faith and he is forcing us to engage in a new way to govern,” Hodes said.
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. said the speech was “very strong.” “The President made it very clear that addressing these spending issues is going to be a priority for him, and it’s certainly going to be a priority for me,” Gregg said in a written statement. “I believe that here in the Senate we have the opportunity to take some strong and decisive action in this area by trying to control the rate of growth of entitlement spending, and I am hopeful that the President will come forward with specific programs to accomplish that.”

In her Hotline After Dark post, Katherine Lehr quotes other GOP leaders making positive comments about the President’s speech, including Senators John Thune, Mitch McConnell and John McCain. She also quotes David Brooks calling it an “excellent speech,” which “perfectly captured the tenor of the country” and David Gergen calling Obama’s address the “most ambitious we have heard in this chamber in decades.”
We’ve become accustomed to excellent speeches by President Obama. It appears that this one has also served his strategy of building support outside the beltway, as well as in Congress.

Eve Fairbanks at TNR makes a pretty good observation about the anti-Obama tactics that Republicans have embraced since he officially became president: they are eerily similar to the anti-Obama tactics that the McCain-Palion campaign used unsuccessfully to try to keep him out of the White House in the first place.
Eve mentions the earmark-“pork” attack on the stimulus legislation, various “dramatic” gestures, and hilariously failed efforts to get cool with rock-laden videos intended to go “viral.”
But I think there are some other examples as well: the blame-the-poor reaction to Obama’s housing proposal; cries of “welfare” over Obama’s tax proposals, of “socialized medicine” over his health care proposals; and of “socialism” over his banking proposals. And you can’t help but think of McCain’s adoption of Joe the Plumber when viewing the current conservative mania for Rick Santelli
Moreover, it’s not so much that Republicans are imitating the McCain campaign as that the McCain campaign itself out of desperation embraced some of the longest-playing themes of the hard-core Right. Anyone who’s spent much time listening to conservative talk radio over the last couple of decades would find the rhetoric of both the McCain campaign and of today’s congressional Republicans depressingly familiar. They’re replaying some very old tapes here, and it’s clear they think they are timeless classics.

Matt Miller has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal which adds to the minority of us progressive gabbers who think that Barack Obama’s “bipartisanship” is aimed at a political realignment rather than short-term compromises with Republicans in Washington.

The president has his eye on a bigger prize than winning a few Republican votes for his stimulus package or having a conservative in his cabinet. He aims to move the political center in America to the left, much as Ronald Reagan moved it to the right. The only way he can achieve this goal is to harness the energies and values of both parties.

Matt doesn’t quite put it this way, but the more concrete Obama objective is to expand the Democratic electoral base by consolidating high levels of support among independents and exploiting the growing divide between Republican politicians and a significant minority of GOP voters.
It’s obviously too early to judge whether this approach is working, but a new Washington Post-ABC poll out today certainly shows how it might work in terms of voter categories.
The Post‘s write-up of the poll dwells on the sharp reduction in Republican support for Obama’s job performance: it’s down to 37% from 62% on Inaugural Day. Well, of course it is; Inaugural Day was and always has been a “peak moment” for any new president, and a month of relentless pounding of Obama by GOP elected officials was bound to resonate with the conservative “base” who heard him described as an elitist socialist baby-killer throughout the presidential campaign.
But Obama’s job approval rating among independents is 67%. Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who think Obama’s trying to compromise with Republicans in Congress is 74%, while the percentage who think Republicans in Congress are trying to compromise with him is 34%. Unsurprisingly, while Obama’s overall job approval rating is 68%, and that of Democrats in Congress is 50%, Republicans in Congress earn a job approval rating of only 38%.
All this could change, but the trajectory in public opinion is towards an isolation of congressional Republicans, who are helping this dynamic along by their behavior towards Obama and the economic crisis itself. You can call it “redefining the center” or simply “realignment,” but if it continues, Obama and the Democratic Party could be well-positioned for the future.

With most of the nation’s governors in town over the weekend for the winter NGA meeting, much of the talk centered around the recovery bill signed into law by President Obama last week.
The stimulus package contains billions of dollars earmarked for state governments, but throughout the process, a handful of conservative governors — namely South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry — have threatened to turn the money down.
That threat is largely toothless.
Language inserted into the final bill by South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, will allow state lawmakers to bypass the executives to access the funds.
Specifically, the law states:

If funds provided to any state in any division of this act are not accepted for use by the governor, then acceptance by the state legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such state.

And governors from both sides of the aisle have said they would accept any of the funds rejected by the conservatives.
On Fox News Sunday, Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan told her GOP colleagues, ““We’ll take it. We’ll take your money.”
On ABC’s This Week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: I’ll take it. I’m more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn’t want to take this money.”
Predictably, many of the conservatives are now walking back their earlier statements.
For instance, Gov Perry informed the Obama administration last week that Texas would accept its share of the funding.
The reality is that, setting aside some symbolic gesture, all the state governments will put the recovery funds to use.
Anyone suggesting otherwise is simply trying to score cheap points with the conservative base.

Paul Starr has a short, but insightful post, “Breaking the Grip of the Past” at The American Prospect today, which sheds light on president Obama’s political strategy. As Starr explains:

For Barack Obama and the Democrats, the problem is not just the hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party and the right-wing media echo chamber. Given the urgency of present circumstances, the critical impediment may lie in the ambivalent center — among the middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans who hold the margin of votes in the Senate, much of the business and opinion-leader establishment, and a large part of the public who are not strongly affiliated with any party or ideological position.
Winning over those groups poses the key challenge if Congress and the new administration are to free the country from the dead right hand of the past. Obama’s mix of conciliatory and assertive stances — an openness to talking with the other side and a willingness to concede, in principle, that it may have a point, yet a determination when pressed to fight for his policies — is not just an expression of his personality. It’s the rational strategy of a politician who can’t get his program through unless he peels off some part of the opposition.

Starr goes on to note Obama’s tendency “not to confront conservatism in general terms” which Starr believes makes some sense because “Many Americans who identify themselves as conservative nonetheless favor liberal positions on specific policies” — a “symbolically conservative, but operationally liberal” group estimated at 22 percent of the public in 2004 by James A. Stimson in his book Tides of Consent. Starr believes surveys indicate there may be a “big increase” in this group since the election.
Starr believes Obama’s ‘whatever works’ rhetoric is calibrated to address this group and the “deep American strain of post-partisanship.” WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne sees the evolving consensus on bipartisanship a little differently in his column today on “Obama’s FDR Moment“:

And when it comes to bipartisanship, the point is not the numerical count of Republicans who vote for this or that. It’s whether frightened citizens sense that government is working…”People want the basic stuff fixed,” said state Rep. Vernon Sykes, a Democrat who chairs the Finance and Appropriations Committee in the Ohio House. “They don’t have a romantic notion of bipartisanship. They just want people to come together to solve problems.”

Post or bipartisanship notwithstanding, Starr credits Obama with drawing a line in the sand against more tax cuts for the rich and do-nothing government. Starr feels this rhetorically-nuanced approach could well “educate the public about the folly of conservative views and help move the country toward a new progressive center.” However, Starr warns,

it’s crucial, perhaps more for others than for Obama, to continue to press the case that our present problems have ideological roots — that they are not due equally to all sides but rather to the mistaken premises, malignant neglect, and sometimes outright malfeasance of a long era of conservative government…But if he concedes too much, it could be another version of disabling triangulation

It’s a delicate balancing act, and the President’s communications skills in educating the public will be on wide display tomorrow, when he addresses the nation. It may be Obama’s “FDR moment,” but he should also remember MLK’s dictum “Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.”

As Ed Kilgore noted in a post last week, the White House has been dropping hints that the first Obama budget, which will be formally released on Thursday but will be a major topic of the President’s speech to Congress tomorrow, will at least lay the foundation for universal health care.
Jonathan Cohn at TNR has some more advance intelligence on the budget and health care, and is hearing that Obama will specifically identify only a portion of the funds needed in the long run to move towards universal health care:

Obama will restate his commitment to making health care available to everybody, to improving the quality of care, and to bringing its costs under control–in effect, reiterating the promises he’s made since he started running for president. He will also call for putting aside money in the budget for fulfilling that commitment–a sum, I’m told, that will be “significant” and enough to convince skeptics he’s serious about the endeavor.
Some of that money will represent savings from other government health programs. For example, Obama will propose that the government reduce the excessive payments it now gives to private insurers participating in the Medicare program. Another source of funds will be a financial contribution from medium- and large-employers who don’t provide employees with health insurance.
But even when all of this money is put together, it won’t be enough to pay the very high cost of universal coverage. Making coverage available to everybody involves, among other things, expanding programs like Medicaid and subsidizing the purchase of insurance for people who can’t afford it on their own.* And although Obama will aggressively pursue reforms designed to make medical care less expensive over time, it will be many years before those reforms can yield significant savings.
Here’s where things get interesting. Obama will say he’s determined to find that remaining sum, through offsetting revenue increases or spending cuts that will allow him to stay true to his pledge of fiscal responsibility. But Obama won’t be specifying the offsets in this budget overview. Instead, he’ll pledge to work with Congress on identifying them.

So: as Cohn goes on to say, how Obama frames this “down-payment on universal health care” in his speech tomorrow will be very important both politically and fiscally. You can expect Republicans to charge that he’s asking Americans to buy a pig in a poke. But more likely, what he’s trying to avoid is creating a big ripe immediate target for Republicans and industry opponents of his plan, while seeking to convince folks that universal health care is worth the cost, and the effort.

Bill Scher’s Blog for our Future post features a link-rich discussion on “Are Blue Dogs helping or Hurting EFCA?”
CQPolitics Poll-Tracker flags a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, conducted 2/17-18, indicating that “Voters say by 66 percent to 28 percent that Obama had tried to reach out to Republicans and be bipartisan about the package, and they say 60 percent to 33 percent that the Republicans have not sincerely tried to act in a bipartisan way.”
Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes an updated look at the ’10 Senate races and concludes that “so far the Republicans appear to have very limited opportunities to pick up Democratic seats.” Hotline On Call‘s Jennifer Skalka focuses on the Senate race in MO, and reports on Robin Carnahan’s chances for taking the seat for Dems, due to a contentious GOP field.
Alexander Zaitchik’s Alternet post “5 Great Progressive Moves by Obama That You Might Have Missed” discusses Obama’s action on behalf of high speed rail, broad band expansion, reforming the Faith-Based Intitiative, a more sensible drug abuse policy and arms control — not too shabby for month one.
Susan Davis of the Wall St. Journal takes a look at the pros and cons of President Obama’s first month and provides an opportunity for readers to give Obama a letter grade. Somewhat surprisingly, 35+ percent of WSJ readers give him an “A”, a higher percentage than any other grade. But Dems gotta like the comment following the post by GreyK: “Out of the wreckage of the previous administration we see a group of thoughtful dedicated people trying to get the country back on track. Me likey.”
Sam Quinones, L.A. Times ace reporter on Mexico and related U.S. immigrations issues, has a frightening report in the latest issue of Foreign Policy on the expanding drug war south of the Rio Grande, now spilling over into U.S. border states, a development which could have a potent efect on U.S. immigration policy — and the growth of a key pro-Democratic party constituency.
Pollster.com concludes a week-long series on TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg’s new book “Dispatches from the War Room,” with a contribution from Greenberg.
Chris Bowers makes the case at OpenLeft that “legalizing marijuana is more popular than the Republican Party, most leading Republicans, and virtually the entire Republican platform..”

Careful readers of my last post just below may have deduced that I don’t have a real high opinion of Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who treated viewers yesterday to a lengthy tirade on the outrage of Barack Obama trying to help “losers” who can’t pay their mortgages. It’s fine by me if anyone wants to disagree with Obama on housing policy, though I’m not sure why CNBC thinks it’s okay for a “reporter” to indulge himself with a hyper-ideological tirade from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. But what I find despicable about Santelli is his puffed-up sense of moral superiority towards millions of people he knows nothing about, and who are already suffering from personal economic misfortunes that I rather doubt he could imagine.
In any event, I regret to report that Santelli’s receiving not only approbation, but instant folk-hero status on the political Right. At National Review, aside from Larry Kudlow’s “moral hazard” lecture playing off Santelli’s rant, you’ve got an interview with Santelli himself, wherein he modestly appraises himself as just a red-blooded American saying something that everybody he knows agrees with, and then a mocked-up “Palin-Santelli 2012” campaign poster published at The Corner by Kathryn Lopez. Joe the Plumber must be green with envy.
I don’t know what’s more disturbiing about this festive treatment of Santelli’s expression of the Rage of the Trading Floor: that so many conservatives seem to identify with him, or that they seem to think his is a point of view that could soon sweep America, where the main feeling about the economy is that people who aren’t doing well deserve it.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist