According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, more Americans approve of the job that President Obama is doing than disapprove for the first time since this summer....
It's too soon to draw sweeping conclusions, but it seems that the standoff with House Republicans over the payroll tax cut did no damage at all to the president.
No doubt. And since we're all going to draw sweeping conclusions anyway, after judiciously noting it's too soon, here's mine; which, while related to the above, hauls the militant act of sweeping conclusions to a whole new theatre of speculative operations. To wit ...
Over at the NY Times' "Campaign Stops," Harvard's Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, authors of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, relate this desperate gem, gathered up from a Virginia Tea Partier: "We have to get Obama out; Obama and the Communists he’s surrounded himself with."
That is precisely the kind of oppositional crazy that most presidents only dream of. Lyndon Johnson had it, FDR had it -- phonetically, agane and agane -- and Richard Nixon manufactured it. But however the occasional president can get it, that president cherishes it, since it vastly moderates any presidential failings by contrast. What likely benefited George W. Bush in 2004 more than John Kerry's unpardonable campaign mismanagement? Well-meaning but hypersalivating lefty bloggers and activists denouncing "Bush and the Nazis he's surrounded himself with." Such rhetoric persuades no one but the already persuaded, so not even them; meanwhile its radical influence on orthodox swing voters is only off-putting.
And in 2012, Barack Obama will be blessed by right-wing crazies like we haven't witnessed since 1964. To their insular, paranoid minds they'll be trumpeting The Truth to the commie-enslaved masses, while the latter will hear but an unhinged, extremist alternative.
Indeed, the multitudes have already heard just that, and as a bonus warning they've seen its actual materialization in the U.S. House. So, to them, Obama and those communists he surrounds himself with are looking better and better every day.
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