Does watching too much cable TV news turn your brain into gelatinous mush?
Is that wacky Alec Baldwin ad for Hulu about too much TV softening your brain like a ripe banana really true?
It's funny how not paying attention to the latest cable chatter gives you a very different perspective on politics. After a couple of years of paying non-stop attention to all aspects of our hyperactive news flow while covering the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, I decided to check out of cable news for the last week or two. I just read polls, selected news stories and reports, and talked to experts about what was going on. With glitches here and there, it seemed Barack Obama was doing well. Most voters certainly thought highly of him.
Not that I didn't know what was going on with the cable nets. I can't stop doing a little channel surfing, and it was clear that the cable chatters were talking themselves into a tizzy. Obama, they said, was flopping, his presidential honeymoon long since a thing of the past.
President Barack Obama zeroed in on the economic crisis in his weekend video/radio address.
Obama has been president now for 20 days. He's actually gotten some stuff done already, and is close to passing what looks like the beginnings of a new New Deal. And as for his honeymoon being over, maybe so inside the yaposphere, but outside it, eh, not so much.
Tomorrow, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, a key backer of John McCain's Republican presidential primary campaign, will join President Barack Obama at his town hall meeting in Myers, Florida. Crist and several other major Republican governors, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed a letter last week backing Obama on his economic revival program.
Later, a small group of Republican governors mainly from the Deep South came out against the program. They actually got more media coverage. Go figure.
The polls? Well, they're good. Actually, very good. They've been good right along, while Obama's presidency was supposedly collapsing.
The brand-new Gallup Poll shows Barack Obama with a 66% job approval rating. Only 21% disapprove.
Obama is also rated much higher than his Republican opponents on the economic issue. Despite a lot of pounding in recent days, his economic recovery program has a wide margin of popular support.
While conservatives have poked a few holes in the package - thanks in no small measure to some congressional Democrats pinning a kick me sign to it with a number of add-ons that are easy to make fun of - Obama has a whopping 67% approval rating on the economic stimulus while congressional Republicans have only a 31% approval on the issue.
President Barack Obama at his town hall meeting today in Elkhart, Indiana.
Other credible polls say much the same thing. Even the Republican Rasmussen poll has Obama's approval very high.
It looks like the Senate will adopt a version of Obama's economic recovery program early this week, which then must be reconciled with the version that sailed through the House of Representatives late last month. Obama wants that reconciliation done swiftly.
In future, although in reality this is all happening very quickly, since the guy was inaugurated exactly 20 days ago, Obama and company might want to avoid letting entrenched congressmembers write too much of their legislation. That provided some easy, though relatively minor, targets for their opposition and the ADD media culture to chew on throughout the day. But in the end, the chatter won't matter.
Has Obama and his team made some other mistakes? Sure. Mistakes always happen. Two things matter about that. Are you moving in the right direction, especially in contrast to your opposition? And do you make needed adjustments?
There have been a couple of misfiring appointments. And Obama may have been too enamored of bipartisanship, for example.
That is to say, too enamored of political bipartisanship, not rhetorical bipartisanship. The non-hyperpartisan public likes the idea of bipartisanship. It would certainly be a good thing if everybody worked together.
President Barack Obama told the Democratic congressional retreat Friday night in Virginia that Republicans are forgetting that their ideas have been rejected.
But it's not much of a surprise that only a few Republicans will play along in a substantive way. It would be nice to think that John McCain, after his unfortunately erratic performance on economic policy in the campaign, would have learned that tax cuts uber alles is not a credible approach. He hasn't yet.
What a lot of folks chattering away on the tube have apparently forgotten is that the Republicans got killed in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
They lost 52 seats in the House of Representatives and 14 seats in the U.S. Senate.
Those big defeats carved away a lot of relatively moderate Republicans, especially in the House, where gerrymandered districts drawn for safe incumbencies are the order of the day in both parties. What's left for the Republicans is a more dominant hard right-wing core.
So, knowing that, is it a mistake to call for bipartisanship, knowing that all but a few Republicans won't really respond because they are inherently incapable of responding? Of course not. To the public, if not the pundits, it makes the Republicans look worse. And that is what the polls show.
Fox News commentator Glenn Beck claimed that Obama is ushering in a "Communist" regime. With children's health insurance and capping executive pay in financial outfits in any new government bail-out to $500,000 a year.
Is it a mistake to prod Rush Limbaugh into further exercising his massive ego? Maybe to a pundit who wants to get promoted by Limbaugh's strange running mate, Matt Drudge. But not for the public, most of which does not like Limbaugh and regards him as an errant extremist.
Where Obama may have made a mistake is in being too substantively accommodating -- say, on tax cuts, which are a less efficient way of stimulating the economy than infrastructure development -- with people who are basically not going to support him except in the event of an extraterrestrial invasion.
And even then, some of these folks would balk, claiming that Obama himself was the aliens' advance guard. Or that without Guantanamo Bay there is no way to win.
But those are the details. In the overall, Obama is doing pretty darn well.
You can check things out during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
|
Senate Stimulus Bill (Full Text)
Updated on February 8 The pdf is now available. * * * * * Updated on February 8 The compromise Senate stimulus bill has been...
|
|
Obama Admin To Unveil New Rescue Plan For Banks
After weeks of internal debate, the Obama administration has settled on a plan to inject billions of dollars in fresh capital into banks and entice...
|
|
Economists Agree: Pass Stimulus Package Immediately
While economists remain divided on the role of government generally, an overwhelming number from both parties are saying that a government stimulus package -- even...
|
|
Obama Hits The Road Again To Sell A Stimulus Plan
WASHINGTON - The presidential campaign trail often loved Barack Obama more than he loved it back. When he was sworn in last month, he told...
|
|
Why The Stimulus Is Too Small
There's a hurricane coming. Meteorologists aren't sure what category it will be but know it will be the worst in generations. There's a warehouse full...
|
|
GOP Fired Up By Stimulus Battle: "We're Picking Good Fights"
You see it all over Capitol Hill, in the hallways, the hearing rooms, the gathering spots. Republicans, coming off a devastating, across-the-board electoral defeat, are...
|
|
Krugman: Obama Let Centrists Hurt Stimulus Bill
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers...
|
|
Stimulus, Yes; Bank Bailout II, No
If Obama does his job he will mobilize public opinion and isolate Republicans who would rather sink the economy than give a Democratic president legislative success.
|
|
Economic Stimulus: Investing in Vets Delivers a Huge Bang for the Buck
As the Senate begins to debate the stimulus package this week, our elected leaders must ensure that any plan fully supports the newest generation of veterans and their families.
|
|
Billionaire For A Day: A More Entertaining Economic Stimulus Package
Let's do something to capture all Americans attention and by doing so make the economic stimulus package real to all of us: 800 Americans will each win a billion dollars.
|
|
Bipartisanship Fetishism vs. What's Best for America: Obama Needs to Choose
At last night's press conference, CBS's Chip Reid asked President Obama about whether, given the lack of bipartisanship on the stimulus bill, the White House was "moving away" from its "emphasis on bipartisanship?" Obama replied that his "bottom line when it comes to the recovery package" is: does it create or save jobs? That's good to hear because the president's actions over the last couple of weeks have left many wondering whether bipartisanship, rather than what's best for America, has been his priority. Perhaps there will come a day when the Venn diagrams of the Republican Party and the national interest actually intersect. But, at the moment, we find ourselves with a GOP whose leaders believe, among other things, that government jobs are not real jobs, and that Obama's stimulus plan is "the socialist way." Hard for bipartisanship to flourish in this kind of atmosphere.
|
|
Palin's Facebook Page: Opposes Obama's Stimulus Plan
We learn on Facebook that Palin has "serious concerns" with Obama's stimulus package. Say what?
|
|
Stimulate Me!
Experts seem relatively unified, if such a thing is possible, on the issue of direct economic stimulus to every taxpayer. They're against it.
|
|
Just imagine: What if McCain Had Won the Election and Obama had Shafted him During the Stimulus Debate?
Um, are McCain's feelings after losing an election the big question on people's minds in the nation? I think the stimulus package is the focus of the country right now, don't you?
|
|
Where's Ross Perot When You Need Him?
I'm ready for a little old fashioned Ross Perot specification of the expected outcomes of the stimulus package. This is what we call in education a "teachable moment."
|
|
Rahm Throws Pelosi Under The Bus To Save Stimulus Bill
The story of the morning seems to be that the Obama team is unhappy with Nancy Pelosi and the House committee chairs for delivering up such a liberal, pork-laden bill that they themselves really had nothing to do with.
|
|
Our Twin Crises
That we are unable to manage a functioning economy or deal with climate change because rapacious Wall Street traders have disproportionate political clout is a measure of our political dysfunction.
|
|
Spaghetti Economics
We need to throw lots of spaghetti against the wall, and fast -- and continue to throw lots of spaghetti against the wall for at least a few years.
|
|
Steele Crazy After All This Year
We are witnessing, not so much the collapse of the Republican Party, as its slide into insanity. What was the GOP's great accomplishment last week? A show of "unity" enough to block the first stimulus package.
|
|
Patriotic Extortion
Imagine if the Democrats had not pre-capitulated to the Republicans on the stimulus bill. Imagine if they had forced the Republicans to actually mount a filibuster.
|
|
Command and Control?
At a time when the country is virtually pleading with him to exert command and control, he has yielded that role to congressional partisans that the public doesn't quite know and almost certainly doesn't trust.
|
|
Why the Stimulus is Needed, Part II
Given the decreases in personal consumption expenditures and gross private domestic investment, what are the chances of the consumer spending again or business investing again?
|
|
House vs. Senate Stimulus Bills
Some highlights: The House version would spend $60 billion more on education -- the Senate version adds more than $100 billion for tax cuts to individuals and families.
|
|
A Better Stimulus for the Economy
The problem with our economy is not weak spending, which is just a symptom of our predicament. The root problem is lack of confidence in the future.
|
|
The Truth About the Stimulus Package
Until other countries are willing to do their share to stimulate the global economy, the Obama administration is right to lift our boat first.
|
|
Operation Zero Cred
The GOP with Joe the Plumber on the Hill this week to discuss the economy. They should be summarily shut out of this process -- whether or not the president wants them out.
|
|
|
Stimulus Package: If You Jump Halfway Across a Chasm You Fall Into the Abyss
If we are going to spend two trillion dollars (and most likely more) trying to deal with the economic crisis, shouldn't we do it right?
|
|
Delusional or Just Cynical?
A good example of the "frothing at the mouth" reaction to the stimulus plan is a blog penned by Jonathan Tobin, Executive Editor of Commentary.
|
|
Change vs. Bipartisanship: What Happens When You Throw a Bipartisan Party and Half the Guest List Stays Home?
The problem with a message of bipartisanship is that it makes it very difficult to tell the story of why things are so bad that we need dramatic change.
|
|
|
Obama Financial Team to Taxpayers: You'll Get Nothing, and Like It
There's nothing that prevents the public from getting their fair share of any future bank profits appropriate to the high risk investment they are being forced to make.
|
|
No, Seriously: Republicans Don't Get It
Investment in bike paths will not only improve our economy, and take our country in the right direction for the future; it is exactly the kind of investment the American people want.
|
|
Selling Stimulus
What the administration needs, and what its senior advisers proved so adept at during the campaign, is a simpler, more compelling, campaign-style message for what this legislation is really about.
|
|
A New Movement
There is a movement to strip billions of dollars from the stimulus bill led by Ben Nelson of Omaha (whose Democratic status is debatable) and Susan Collins (Republican) of Maine.
|
|
Bipartisanship (is) for Dummies
The idea that we can turn this economy around by caving to the feckless demands of those who screwed it up in the first place is utterly bankrupt.
|
|
Stimulating
As muddled as this economic stage may be -- and all major measures taken in crisis usually are -- it is born of the drive to reconstruct and not profiteer, and that alone is progress to applaud.
|
|
Obama: Use This And the Jobs Bill Will Pass With a 100 Vote Margin
Our best salesman is Obama. There is no house or senate member who this president cannot roll over.
|
|
Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes
The American people elected President Obama in record numbers to lead our country in a new direction, if the Republicans aren't willing to join him, the least they can do is get out of his way.
|
|
|
Obama to Speak Monday Night on Stimulus While Rep. Pete Sessions Says Republicans Are the New Taliban
If the media hadn't acted so irresponsibly the past two weeks and President Obama hadn't tried to be so bipartisan, he might not have had to take to the airwaves, but that's not the case anymore.
|
|
Our Phone Calls Are Working, Don't Let Up!
If representatives know that's what their constituents want, they will be both more inclined to keep that critical public investment from the House bill, and act with the speed.
|
|
|
Obama Undermines Jobs Mandate For the Sake of Bipartisanship
Roosevelt had the New Deal, Kennedy had the New Frontier, Johnson had the Great Society, and Obama has...the stimulus plan. An abstract goal with fungible components that valued process above all else.
|
|
Lions Coach Up Steelers on Stimulus Package
How can anyone take the GOP seriously on economic policy? Agree or disagree on their philosophy; their record is demonstrably terrible. They are the Detroit Lions of Congress.
|
|
Republicans Say They'd Support the "Right" Stimulus Bill, But Stimulus for Them Is Only More Tax Cuts
If you look closely at what the Republicans are saying, this isn't a debate on the merits of this stimulus legislation, but rather another round of policy battles fought during last year's campaign.
|
|
|
Democrats in Congress Need to Learn How to Lead
I am losing patience with congressional Democrats' innate instinct to capitulate, something that has been evident since the November 2006 mid-term elections.
|
