Just more than half the public says that it’s bad for the country that the GOP controls the House of Representatives, according to a new national poll conducted after the end of the partial government shutdown. And the CNN/ORC International survey also indicates that more than six in 10 Americans […] Read more »
Obama’s Job Approval Declines to 44.5% in 19th Quarter
President Barack Obama averaged a 44.5% job approval rating during his 19th quarter in office, a decline of more than three percentage points from his 18th quarter. That is one of the largest quarter-to-quarter declines of his presidency, behind a nine-point drop in his third quarter and a six-point drop […] Read more »
The shutdown showdown: What changed in Washington, what didn’t
As with a terrible headache that finally eases, the reverberations of the 16-day government shutdown continue to echo around Washington even though the immediate crisis has passed. The question everyone in politics is trying to answer is whether and how much the shutdown showdown changed things inside and outside Washington. […] Read more »
Seeing Things in Red and Blue After All
The great irony of Barack Obama’s political rise is that it depended on what turned out to be his single biggest political miscalculation. From the moment he appeared on a national stage — in his 2004 “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America” speech — he held […] Read more »
The Reselling of the President
Richard Wolffe’s account of the 2012 election [“The Message: The Reselling of President Obama”] is a fine behind-the-scenes campaign-trail book that makes me wonder about the future of behind-the-scenes campaign-trail books. … Yet “The Message” is actually most interesting when Wolffe descends from the executive suite to the “boiler room,” […] Read more »
The Government Shutdown: An After Action Report
This slide deck tries to put the government shutdown in perspective, starting with the lack of support for totally eliminating federal funding for the new health care law if it meant shutting down the federal government, and including our thoughts about why the shutdown happened, the initial consequences, and the […] Read more »