Findings from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll are really quite striking. It seems that Everyman suddenly has far more faith in the president he just shellacked, and virtually none in the party he just elevated to power. Go figure.
Which is precisely what NBC/WSJ did, and it's the particulars that stun -- nearly all, pleasantly. Obama's job approval, for instance, shot up across the spectrum, but in no group higher than that of independents: a whopping 11 point increase (to 46 percent) in only one month. Obama's Democratic base? Its approval stands at 86 percent, a near uniform show of support that will perhaps (though I doubt it) subdue the base's activist branch from predicting a mass exodus in 2012 and certain reelection doom.
In fact, if the presidential election were held today, Obama, according to the poll, would beat Mitt Romney by 7 points, making that the only contest of any conceivable excitement. Obama leads Mike Huckabee by 10 points, he crushes Newt Gingrich by 19, and Sarah Palin starts at a 22-point disadvantage, which, knowing Palin's knack for self-inflicted imbecility, would only widen from there.
Most striking, however, is the rapidity with which Obama's political strategy of unyielding cooperativeness, so to speak, has effectively taken hold of the public's imagination. From NBC News's "First Read," I quote: "a majority (55 percent) believe congressional Republicans will be too inflexible in dealing with President Obama, while an equal number (55 percent) say Obama will strike the right balance." Those twin figures reflect not only a broad disapproval of the GOP's intransigence campaign, but a solid thumbs-up for Obama's gentle tenacity.
The former, in both spirit and statistics, is unlikely to shift anytime soon, since for Republican pols there's no thrill like that of playing to their confrontational base. Yet this number (pdf), behind the question of "Do you think President Obama will be ... too quick to give in to Republicans in Congress...?" aggressively leaps out: only 15 percent said yes. And that conforms, in a puzzle-fitting way, almost exactly to Obama's base-approval number of 86: in brief, disaffected progressive activists are, at best, merely holding their negligible numbers.
On the lighter, even comical side of things, the public expresses only gossamer confidence in the ultraconservative cavalry -- that which the motivated public so recently called forth: "Just 25 percent say that the Republicans in Congress will bring 'the right kind of change' to the country" -- a stat that should be thrown by every journalist in every Republican's face when the latter begins pathologically prattling about fulfilling the American people's legislative desires.
A fitting windup to this statistical review is, I think, the recent online exchange between the NY Times' David Brooks and Gail Collins. In assessing Obama's first two years, conservative Brooks noted, with undisguised glee, that "Republicans are more and more concerned that the guy has the wind at his back. Contempt has turned into fear and respect. All in all, kind of impressive"; and liberal Collins concluded, "here’s my bottom line: even if he never does anything else, he’s already accomplished a greater domestic agenda than any president in the last half-century. And if he can protect it, while getting all the moderates to forget about it, he’ll have pulled off the political coup of our lifetimes."
And that, in the way of my own conclusion, is precisely the kind of cognitive "Coming together" that Obama has so vigorously sought. To be sure, he cannot prevent the divisive ideological savagery of extremists and absolutists, but, from the center-left to center-right, he can assemble Reason. And he has -- spendidly.