Governor Sanford Gets The Gas Face

From the AP

The Obama administration has rejected South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's request to use $700 million in federal stimulus cash to pay down state debt.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag (OHR'-zag) said in a letter to the Republican on Monday that the federal stimulus law doesn't allow President Barack Obama to make an exception for that cash. Sanford sought a waiver last week, asking to pay off debt rather than use the money to create jobs and avoid deep program cuts.

Ray LaHood Hits Back At His Former Republican Colleagues

Nice to see that not all Republicans are raving idealogues.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, LaHood, one of the few Republican members of the Obama administration, scoffed at the recent talking points emanating from the congressional leaders of his own party. His voice rising at times with emotion, the transportation czar tackled first the notion that the president was a socialist in disguise.

"I don't agree with it," LaHood said. "If you go out and interview these people working on this road in Maryland... these people are thrilled. They are thrilled that they are working in March on a good paying job building roads, which is what they were trained to do. That's going to be happening all over America. So the idea that this is socialism -- it is not socialism, it is economic development. It is going to provide an economic engine around communities all over American for jobs; good paying jobs; and help people pay their bills. I don't call that socialism.... We are the model for the world when it comes to infrastructure. We are the model for the interstate system. I don't call that socialism. Our $40 billion [for the Department of Transportation]: not socialism. It is good paying jobs that is going to drive the economies in a lot of states and a lot of communities."

snip

Faced with these numbers, Republican strategists have deployed a separate strategy: portraying the president, with each passing day, as more and more responsible for the current crisis.

Asked about this line of attack, replete with phrases like the "Obama recession," Secretary LaHood offered a similarly ardent rebuke. If blame is to be cast, he declared, it can only, at this point, lie with the previous White House.

"This is not an Obama recession," he said. "He inherited all of this. He inherited a $1 trillion dollar debt. He inherited the recession. He inherited the lousy stock market. All of this was inherited. The guy has been in office a little over a month and what he has tried to do is listen to every economist he could listen to. And he put in place some opportunities to get people to work quickly through the transportation bill portion of it, to help the banks, and to help the real estate industry. And it is going to take time."

Stimulus In Action

Man, I guess government CAN create jobs.

CHICAGO — The 250 workers who staged a December sit-in at a Chicago window factory to protest losing their jobs were celebrating Thursday, after another window manufacturer announced plans to reopen the plant and start hiring back the displaced workers within months.

The sale of what had been Republic Windows and Doors to a California company, Serious Materials, for $1.45 million, was completed in bankruptcy court this week, with company officials promising United Electrical Workers Local 1110 to rehire all the laid-off workers at their former rate of pay.

“We see this opportunity to expand our operations in direct relation to the stimulus package, which includes the greening of federal buildings and the weatherization assistance program,” said Sandra Vaughan, the chief marketing officer for Serious Materials, which also manufactures energy-efficient windows and building products in Boulder, Colo., and Vandergrift, Pa.

Suck on that Michael Steele. That is after you finish up with Rush lol.

Leave It To A White Man To Compare The Stimulus Bill To Slavery

Stay classy Republican Virginia State Delegate Robert Marshall.

And The Truth Shall Set You Free

I was all ready to type up a post slamming my home state of Tennessee's Governor Phil Bredesen for him joining the chorus of his fellow Republican Governers in opposition to the money for unemployment in the stimulus bill (and don't get me wrong I am still pissed off about that) when I came across a quote in this article from the Chatanooga Times that made me change my mind. You see Bredesen messed around and told the truth after Governors Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford held an impromptu news conference after meeting with President Obama yesterday with the rest of the governers around the country and trashed the stimulus bill. Here is what he had to say about that...

Gov. Bredesen took issue with some Republican governors who emerged from the National Governors Association meeting with Mr. Obama on Monday and criticized the stimulus package as wasteful, focusing mainly on the unemployment funding. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford led the criticism at an impromptu news conference outside the West Wing, as other governors looked on.

“I’m sorry the way this developed out here,” Gov. Bredesen said. “The conversation with the governors of South Carolina and Louisiana in the room, I would say, were more supportive and more conciliatory about these things than they were in front of the cameras here.”

So when these two jackasses were in the same room with President Obama they were gracious and then when they left the meeting they decided to stab him in the back. That just goes to show that the Republicans are full of it when they come to this debate and it also goes to show that these two in particular are nothing but cowards. Next time try saying it to his face.


(h/t MY)

The Can't Have It Both Ways

This letter to Peter Orszag is a brilliant move by Senator Charles Schumer. By creating a situation where the stimulus funds are all or nothing he is taking away the Republican Goverenor's ability to rail against the stimulus bill while accepting more than 98% of the funds. Now all the pressure will be on Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford and others to either take all of the money and STFU or reject the money to take a stand for their Presidential runs and face the wrath of their constituents. I wonder which route they will take...

As you know, Section 1607(a) of the economic recovery legislation provides that the Governor of each state must certify a request for stimulus funds before any money can flow. No language in this provision, however, permits the governor to selectively adopt some components of the bill while rejecting others. To allow such picking and choosing would, in effect, empower the governors with a line-item veto authority that President Obama himself did not possess at the time he signed the legislation. It would also undermine the overall success of the bill, as the components most singled out for criticism by these governors are among the most productive measures in terms of stimulating the economy.

For instance, at least two governors have proposed rejecting a program to expand unemployment insurance for laid-off workers. Economists consistently rank unemployment insurance among the most efficient and cost-effective fiscal stimulus measures; by one frequently cited estimate, it provides an economic return of as high as $1.73 for every dollar invested. Thus, by denying this provision for their residents, these governors are not just depriving some of the neediest Americans of relief in a dire economy; they are undermining the overall stimulative impact of the package.

No one would dispute that these governors should be given the choice as to whether to accept the funds or not. But it should not be multiple choice. The composition of the package was rightly dictated by economic considerations; we should not let the implementation of the package be dictated by political

I Heart Rahm Emmanuel

This profile of Rahm Emmanuel in the New Yorker is all kinds of AWESOME SAUCE. I know there are some in the progressive blogosphere who seem to have an unhealthy obsession with throwing Rahm under the bus,(cough,Jane Hamsher,cough) but its hard not to read this piece and not come away a fan.

Some excerpts

By any measure, what Obama’s White House has achieved in passing the stimulus bill is historic. The last President to preside over a legislative victory of this magnitude so early in his Administration was Franklin Roosevelt, who on the sixth day of his Presidency persuaded Congress to enact a wholesale restructuring of the banking system. (That, too, is likely in the offing for the Obama team.) Yet praise for Obama was surprisingly grudging. Some liberal Democrats said that Emanuel and his team had made too many concessions to House Republicans, all of whom voted against the legislation. Meanwhile, conservatives complained that Obama had broken his pledge of bipartisan coöperation. Both arguments infuriated Emanuel, who spent hours on the Hill during the negotiations, arranged private meetings with Obama in the Oval Office for the Republican senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter, whose votes were critical to the bill’s passage, and personally haggled over the smallest spending details during a crucial evening of bargaining that lasted until the early morning.

“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?”

Emanuel has heard such complaints before. As a senior aide in the Clinton White House, he successfully fought a Republican Congress to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which now provides health care for seven million kids. “I worked children’s health care,” he said. “President Clinton had pediatric care, eye, and dental, inside Medicaid. The Republicans had pediatric care, no eye and dental, outside of Medicaid. The deal Chris Jennings, Bruce Reed, and Rahm Emanuel cut for President Clinton was eye, dental, and pediatric, but the Republican way—outside of Medicaid. At that time, I was eviscerated by the left.” He slammed his fist on the desk, his voice rising. “I had sold out! Today, who are the greatest defenders of kids’ health care? The very people that opposed it when it passed,” Emanuel said. “Back then, you’d have thought I was a whore! How could we do this outside of Medicaid? They warned that it had to be in Medicaid—not that they gave a rat’s ass that the kid had eye or dental care. But, for getting it outside of Medicaid, we got kids’ eye and dental care. O.K.? That was the swap. Now, my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong. He couldn’t get his legislation.”

The stimulus bill was essentially held hostage to the whims of Collins, Snowe, and Specter, but if Al Franken, the apparent winner of the disputed Minnesota Senate race, had been seated in Washington, and if Ted Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, had been regularly available to vote, the White House would have needed only one Republican to pass the measure. “No disrespect to Paul Krugman,” Emanuel went on, “but has he figured out how to seat the Minnesota senator?” (Franken’s victory is the subject of an ongoing court challenge by his opponent, Norm Coleman, which the national Republican Party has been happy to help finance.) “Write a fucking column on how to seat the son of a bitch. I would be fascinated with that column. O.K.?” Emanuel stood up theatrically and gestured toward his seat with open palms. “Anytime they want, they can have it,” he said of those who are critical of his legislative strategies. “I give them my chair.”

I love Paul Krugman but the guy has a point. Its very easy to sit back and criticize what others do. Its a lot harder to actually try to do the same job and in fact do it better.

When Emanuel said this, I noticed that over his left shoulder, on the credenza behind him, was an official-looking name plate, which he said was a birthday present from his two brothers. It read, “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself.”

Thats classic!

Perhaps Emanuel’s greatest challenge, however, will be making the adjustment from being a prominent elected official to being a staffer. Bolten, who hosted Emanuel and eleven former chiefs of staff for breakfast at the White House in December, said, “One of the interesting bits of advice that emerged from the breakfast was that you probably shouldn’t be a political principal yourself. You need to put aside your own personality and profile and adopt one that serves your boss. I’m not saying you necessarily have to have a low profile, but it can’t really be your own independent profile. It’s got to be the profile your boss wants reflected, and it has to be a profile that does not compete with the rest of the Cabinet.” Emanuel said that he has thought about that advice. “There’s no doubt” that this is an issue, he told me. “There are pluses to who I was and what I was and there are perils to who I was and what I was, and you’ve got to be conscious of them.”

Sounds like a healthy amount of self awareness to me.

More than any other story about Emanuel’s tactics—and there are lots of them—the tale of the “dead-fish race” came to define his public persona as a Democratic operative. He and Axelrod were working for David Swarts, a Democratic official from Erie County, New York, running an underfunded campaign for a congressional seat long held by Republicans. “We were rolling the dice on the race, just spending the money we had as it came in to try and get these numbers up,” Axelrod said. Their plan was to take a poll at the end of the contest which they hoped would show a competitive race and then use the results to help raise last-minute funds and overtake their opponent.

“The poll came back a week or two before the end, and it said we were down by seventeen,” Axelrod said. “And that was it.” According to Axelrod, Swarts’s campaign manager later studied the poll’s findings and concluded that the pollster had botched the analysis: the survey showed that Swarts was just five or six points behind. (The pollster says that the error was actually minor and quickly caught.) Axelrod added, “Had we gotten that correct poll then, we would have put our foot to the pedal. But it was too late. So Rahm, being as invested as he was in the thing, expressed himself as only Rahm can.” After the election, Emanuel and his colleagues hired a Massachusetts company called Enough Is Enough, which specialized in “creative revenge,” to send the pollster a box with a dead fish inside. Emanuel laughed mischievously when I asked him about the prank. “We had our choice of animals,” he said.

Honestly that sounds like something I would do. Scratch that, it sounds like something I would WANT to do but probably back out because of potential implication. I love that he just didn't give a fuck.

Over lunch two days before the Inauguration, Emanuel explained to me his decision to give up his congressional seat and return to the White House. We were in a brasserie in the lobby of a Washington hotel, and Emanuel, dressed in a black sweater over a white button-down, was frequently interrupted by people who wanted to wish him well or have their picture taken with him. “The main hesitation was family, because there’s no way you will convince me this is good for my family,” Emanuel, who has three children, ages eleven, ten, and eight, said. “No matter what every White House says—‘We’re going to be great, family-friendly’—well, the only family we’re going to be good for is the First Family. Everybody else is, like, really a distant second, O.K.?”

I remember Joe Scarborough, who has a few "family" skeletons in his own past, deriding Rahm for considering his family before accepting the job. But I will point out that earlier in the piece this is what Rahm had to say about why he was in a hurry to leave for vacation after the stimulus bill passed.

Emanuel, for his part, seemed indifferent both to the praise in Washington and to the oddball critique from Havana. In a few hours, he would be leaving for a ski trip with his family to Park City, Utah, and he was anxious to get out of the White House and start the weekend. Asked about Castro’s article, he said, “Well, you know, ever since I stopped sending him my holiday card he’s been ticked off. I don’t know what to think about it. Do you know what I’m thinking about? I’m going to finally get to see my kids after a month. So that’s all I give a fuck about.”

That sounds pretty genuine to me.

Now I am a results guy and no matter how pretty a politician talks I want to see what the DO. The end of this article is what sealed the deal for me.

Emanuel laughed as he recounted the final sticking point in the negotiations. It was not, as many people have thought, an argument between the five centrist senators—Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Collins, Snowe, and Specter—and the House but a debate among the centrists themselves. The dispute was over a formula for how Medicaid funds in the bill would be allocated to the states. In the House version of the legislation, fifty per cent of the funds would go to all states and fifty per cent would go to states with high unemployment. In the Senate, where rural interests are more dominant, the formula was 80-20. A deal had been reached between the two chambers to split the difference and make the formula 65-35. “Everybody signed except for Ben Nelson,” Emanuel said. “He wants 72-28, or seventy-two and a half, and he says, ‘I’m not signing this deal.’ Specter says, ‘Well, I am not agreeing with you.’ ” Without Nelson, Collins wasn’t likely to vote for the deal, either.

“Collins and Snowe are kind of like, at this point, looking at their shoes,” Emanuel went on, “because Specter says, ‘Well, why make it seventy-two? What do you mean? We all have it at sixty-five, in the middle.’ ” Emanuel politely declared that the formula would stay at 65-35. He then asked Nelson to step out of the room with him. After a brief conversation in the hallway, they returned, and Nelson agreed to the stimulus package.

Emanuel stood up and removed his tie as he finished the story, making it clear that he was ready to leave for the airport. He seemed more cheerful, knowing that he was that much closer to seeing his family. I asked him what he promised Nelson to persuade him to drop his objections. Emanuel just smiled. “Everything is going to be O.K.,” he said, in a mock-soothing voice. “America is going to be a great place.”

That he was able to bridge the final hurdle in the bill by taking Ben Nelson outside and bust his chops until he stopped being an asshole was the key to the whole story for me. Forget all the talks of sending fish or iron fists, in the end he got the job done. That's the change that I voted for, and that's definitely change I can believe in!

A Principled Idiot

I gotta give it to Bobby Jindal, he might be a dumbass but at least he is backing up his words with actions. I hope that will give him great comfort after they kick his ass out of office in two years. Out of everything to turn down, money for unemployment?!?! All I can say is WOW.

Actions Have Consequences

Somebody should have told Representative Cao that he is beholden to the voters in his district and not the House Republican Leadership. Now it looks like he might be out of office before Roland Burris.

Against It Before They Were For It

Predictable

Dean Breaks Out The Whupping Stick

Governer Howard Dean is now blogging at the Huffington Post which in my mind is even more of a reason for him to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Dean doesn't play that civilized comity game and he calls people out when they are bullshitting. We need somebody in that position who isn't scared to stand up to right wing smears and who will have a laser like focus to get universal healthcare passed. To put it mildly Governer Dean didn't mince any words while killing the zombie WingNut healthcare lie about the American Recovery and Reinvestment act. Some highlights.

Opponents of fixing our broken health care system are at it again, attempting to use their same old scare tactics and falsehoods to kill a common-sense health care provision is the economic recovery package. Fortunately Congressional leaders have recognized these tactics for what they are and have wisely kept this provision in the legislation.

Under attack is a provision that is in the package that will help your doctor be better informed and more effective at the job they signed up to do in the first place - taking care of you and your family.

snip

Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research.

I was surprised to see Senator Coburn (R-Ok) who is also a doctor make a statement against medical research which in part stated "this bill lays the groundwork for a Soviet-style Federal Health Board that will put bureaucrats and politicians in charge of our nation's health care system." Sadly, it seems that Senator Coburn has his political hat on and not his white coat when he relies on Rush Limbaugh to "help" his patients.

This claptrap is really about the far right laying the ground work for a far greater and more sustained attack on the Democrats' attempt to fix our health care system. As we move forward with the American people to finally fulfill the promise of Harry Truman, who over sixty years ago suggested that every American ought to have a reasonable health care plan, we will rely on the voters to remind the right wing that change is what we promised, and change is what we will deliver.

Now I know Governer Dean has many detractors even on the left, but isn't this the kind of guy you want in charge of trying to finally bring universal healthcare to our country? Our children deserve someone with his kind of courage to get in there and get the job done!

The numbers for the White House are:

Comments: 202-456-1111

Switchboard: 202-456-1414

FAX: 202-456-2461

TTY/TDD: Comments: 202-456-6213

And please send an E-MAIL HERE AND HERE TOO AS WELL!



(h/t slinkerwink)

Why Its Better To Have Bill In The Tent

There aren't many people in this country who can be a better advocate for President Obama than Bill Clinton, aside from Obama himself.





(h/t ThinkProgress)

Frank Rich Exposes The Village Echo Chamber

In any opinion piece this morning, Frank Rich takes apart the battle over the stimulus package and what the results really mean. He also includes an interview with David Axlerod that was very telling about how President Obama and his team handled the public argument over the stimulus bill. Its definitely worth the full reading but I will excerpt a few of the more interesting takes.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

snip

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

snip

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

snip

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

snip

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

It is a rarity that a member of the Village actually calls out their cohorts in such a complete and thorough fashion but then again one reason why I like Frank Rich is that he often breaks from the heard and tells it like it is. Hopefully some of his contemporaries will read his article and realize the error of their was. Unfortunately if history is any indication all they will do is get defensive and reject his assessment and double down on trying to create horseraces. But hey at least he gave it a try.

All Hail Chairman Obey

If you have been like me and were tired of the House Republicans getting up and out and out lying in their chamber you will LOVE this beautiful takedown of all things wingnut by Chairman David Obey right before the House passed HR 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Enjoy!

Congressman Cao Is A LIAR And a COWARD

I take back all the nice things I said about Congressman Cao yesterday. Evidently he talks a good game but when push came to shove he had to represent with his wingnut friends. It would have been different if he just voted no, but this is the same person who just ADMITTED his district needs the funds in that bill. I truly hope the people in his district in Louisianna were paying attention.

I'll Give Him A Pass

I am not in the mood to be praising any Republicans in the House who decide to break ranks now and vote for the stimulus bill after voting against it at first. Binut because Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao is new to the Congress AND he represents a district in Louisianna that is made up of mostly minorities and he has shown in his campaign rhetoric before the election and his pledges to represent his district after winning, I have decided to give him a pass on this one. Everybody makes mistakes but at least he is showing the moxy to admit it and even as a freshman Congressman bucking his party and pledging to vote for the bill. Now if it happens again I won't be so forgiving but I really think Cao might be one of the good ones.


We shall see.

(h/t Benen)

Well That Explains A Lot...

Dear Cable News Folks,

You might want to have an economist on your show if you want to, you know, discuss the economic stimulus bill. Just a thought.


Thanks for nothing assholes.


Sincerely,

Moi

Now That's Power

Caterpillar announces that as soon as President Obama signs the American Recovery and Reinvestment act, they will be able to rehire some 20,000 workers.

I'd say thats pretty damn stimulative.

Victory!

The Senate passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by the tally of 61-37. Now off to conference we go!

Outside Of The Village

More poll porn for those who are still listening to the Villagers and believe that President Obama is some kind of inexperienced rube who is getting played by the Republicans...

From the new Pew Poll.

The survey finds that, after nearly a month in office, Obama's personal image is extremely strong. Overwhelming majorities view Obama as a strong leader (77%) and trustworthy (76%), while an even higher percentage (92%) says he is a good communicator. Moreover, the belief that Obama represents a break from politics as usual is widespread, despite the highly partisan reaction to his economic stimulus proposal. About two-thirds of Americans (66%) -- including a narrow majority of Republicans -- say that Obama "has a new approach to politics in Washington"; that compares with 25% who say his approach is "business as usual."

Obama's 64% job approval rating is higher than the initial marks for his two most recent predecessors, George W. Bush (53%) and Bill Clinton (56%). Somewhat fewer Americans (56%) approve of his handling of the economy, though only about a quarter (24%) disapproves; 20% offer no opinion.

With the congressional debate over the stimulus proposal at a crucial point, the public is evenly divided over whether Obama and Republicans on Capitol Hill are working together; 45% say they are not working together while 43% say that they are. However, by nearly four-to-one (61% to 16%), those who say Obama and the Republicans are not cooperating blame Republicans, rather than Obama, for the failure to work together.

Moreover, only about a third of Americans (34%) approve of the job that Republican leaders in Congress are doing, while 51% disapprove. The balance of opinion toward Democratic congressional leaders is much more positive; 48% approve of the job that they are doing compared with 38% who disapprove.

snip

Beyond the wide political division over Obama's proposal, there are also substantial income and class differences. Just 39% of those in the top category for family income -- those making $100,000 or more a year -- say the stimulus proposal is a good idea, while 47% view it negatively. The proposal draws considerably more support among those with low incomes: by wide margins, those with family incomes of less than $30,000 see the proposal as a good idea.

Similarly, while those who say they are in the professional or business class are evenly divided over the stimulus plan (43% good vs. 43% bad), majorities of those who say they are struggling (59%) or working class (52%) view it positively.

Imagine that, the elites don't like the bill but the working class does. LOL President Obama is a BAD boy.


(h/t Greg Sargent)