Peter Roff

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Obama Approval Rating Raises Stakes for Jobs Speech

September 6, 2011 RSS Feed Print

President Barack Obama heads into his Thursday night speech to Congress in something of an unfavorable position.

[See political cartoons about President Obama.]

Only a third of all Americans in one recent CNN poll said they approved of how he is handling the economy—with 7 out of 10 independents registering disapproval. The Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll out this week has three out of every four voters saying the country is on the wrong track and headed in the wrong direction. Obama remains personally popular but his job approval number is upside down, with 50 percent of those surveyed saying they did not approve of the job he is doing as president. [Vote now: Will Obama be a one-term president?]

Obama has to realize going in to Thursday's speech that there is a lot riding on it. It's not exactly a make or break moment for his presidency, but it's close. If he wants to hang on to the White House for another four years he has got to begin to compromise with the Republicans. Like Clinton before him he needs to moderate the uber-liberal track his presidency has taken. Reining in the Environmental Protection Agency last week over new ozone regulations was a good start—and it certainly has the left in a tizzy—but that's a starting point, not a place to end.

[Check out editorial cartoons about the economy.]

The biggest stumbling block on his path to re-election is unemployment—which remains stuck somewhere north of 9 percent. Obama needs to find ways to get the private sector going again so that it can create jobs that these people can get. Putting them to work for the government isn't going to help the economy at large, which is all another round of stimulus proposals really amounts to. The bureaucratic red tape needs to be cut faster, outmoded and conflicting regulations need to be eliminated and the private sector needs to have a sense of what it can expect from the administration in the weeks and months ahead. Now is the time for a real progrowth package, one that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on. The president can start the ball rolling by proposing one Thursday night.

Check out a roundup of editorial cartoons on the economy.
See an opinion slide show of 10 wasteful stimulus projects.
See a slide show of who's in and out for the GOP in 2012.

Tags:: 2012 presidential election,; unemployment,; Obama administration

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Many people are buzzing about an article at truthout.org by one Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican staff aide on Capitol Hill who just couldn’t take the crazy anymore, left his job, and produced this buzzy (and quite well-written) lamentation about his party’s tactics and goals. If you haven’t read it, you must
The Lofgren piece is full of harsh observations and accusations, but here’s just a little sampling:
• The debt-ceiling debate was an act of “political terrorism,” in which the GOP concocted a crisis and used it to ensure that the party's unprecedented demands were met. He writes: “Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.”
• The August FAA reauthorization fight was another instance such of hostage-taking: “Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers, and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel—how prudent is that?—in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”
• The GOP plan to discredit government in the people’s eyes is very conscious: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”
• As for belief as opposed to tactics, the party basically really cares only about the rich. Actually, Lofgren doesn’t say “basically.” He says “solely and exclusively.” And he explains how they’ve camouflaged this with talk of protecting small businesses and so on.
There is much, much more. He’s not very happy either about his party’s militarism, its cynical use of religion, its total opposition to doing anything about the environment, and other matters, but most
programs so they will be there in the future."

Eggman of CO 10:10PM September 06, 2011

Eggman of CO _ Says "The August FAA reauthorization fight was another instance such of hostage-taking: “Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees..."
Wrong:
"Democrats whine that media won’t republish their spin on FAA impasse"
August 4, 2011
"This story from The Hill has a double dose of irony after a week in which the national media, which had been on New Civility watch since January, ignored the explosion of angry rhetoric from Democrats and their own ranks comparing Tea Party activists to terrorists . Harry Reid and other Democrats in the Senate now whine that the national media won’t report their spin on the impasse over FAA funding as fact":
"One reporter asked why Democrats didn’t swallow the cuts to small airports in their states to pass the short-term authorization and then return in September “to fight another day.”
"But Reid retorted that Republicans would find other “hostages” to force Democrats to back down on the labor issue."
"That’s why the FAA remains in partial shutdown. It’s not because Republicans took the FAA “hostage,” or some equally demagogic and paranoid fantasy in the febrile recesses of Harry Reid’s mind. It’s because the Senate didn’t do anything on the FAA extension until it was too late, thanks to Reid’s apparent fantasy of running a House of Lords rather than an American Senate."
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/08/04/democrats-whine-that-media-wont-republish-their-spin-on-faa-impasse/
REMINDS ME OF REID NOT WANTING TO PASS DEBT CEILING RAISE IN DECEMBER. WANTING NEW REPUBLICAN HOUSE TO TAKE SOME OF THE BLAME...

Biill Hedges of MO 9:00PM September 06, 2011

Many people are buzzing about an article at truthout.org by one Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican staff aide on Capitol Hill who just couldn’t take the crazy anymore, left his job, and produced this buzzy (and quite well-written) lamentation about his party’s tactics and goals. If you haven’t read it, you must
The Lofgren piece is full of harsh observations and accusations, but here’s just a little sampling:
• The debt-ceiling debate was an act of “political terrorism,” in which the GOP concocted a crisis and used it to ensure that the party's unprecedented demands were met. He writes: “Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.”
• The August FAA reauthorization fight was another instance such of hostage-taking: “Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers, and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel—how prudent is that?—in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”
• The GOP plan to discredit government in the people’s eyes is very conscious: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”
• As for belief as opposed to tactics, the party basically really cares only about the rich. Actually, Lofgren doesn’t say “basically.” He says “solely and exclusively.” And he explains how they’ve camouflaged this with talk of protecting small businesses and so on.
There is much, much more. He’s not very happy either about his party’s militarism, its cynical use of religion, its total opposition to doing anything about the environment, and other matters, but most
programs so they will be there in the future."

Eggman of CO 6:35PM September 06, 2011

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Obama Approval Rating Raises Stakes for Jobs Speech

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