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A tale of two Obamas: Up in D.C., down in U.S.

By: Mike Allen and James Hohmann
April 16, 2010 04:41 AM EDT

The cover of The Atlantic this month shows a shirt-sleeved President Barack Obama and
the headline, “WHY HE’S RIGHT.” It reflects the Washington conventional wisdom that
Obama is on a roll, bolstered by his long-delayed victory on health reform.

Someone should tell the rest of the country.

While Washington talks about Obama’s new mojo, polls show voters outside the Beltway
are sulking — soured on the president, his party and his program. The Gallup Poll has
Obama’s approval rating at an ominous 49 percent, after hitting a record low of 47 percent
last weekend. A new poll in Pennsylvania, a bellwether industrial state, shows his numbers
sinking, as did recent polls in Ohio and Florida.

So there are two Obamas: Rising in D.C., struggling in the U.S.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell admits that Republicans won the health-care messaging
war and says he has been traveling to dinners and fundraisers across the country to
implore Democrats to fight back.

“The spin took hold,” Rendell said. “I expected more of a bounce than he got, but again it
all goes to 16 months in which the Republicans have dominated the spin on stimulus and
health care. ... It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and say, ‘Game on.’ And the more we
do that, the better it will be.”

It’s yet another deficit for Obama to tackle: The Republican Party has closed its popularity
gap with the Democrats, and people say they’d be at least as happy with the GOP in
charge of Capitol Hill. Wall Street sees a recovery, but everyday Americans think their country
is still on the wrong track. And health reform is even less popular now in some polls than it was
before it passed.

“Everyone in the pressure cooker in Washington got all excited like the millennium had
arrived [when health care reform passed], but I don’t think most reasonable people read it
that way,” Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said. Bredesen said people are
worried about the cost and “appalled at the process in the Congress that produced it.”

Bredesen said that in the states, it’s not about power politics and who’s up and who’s
down, but about the cost — an estimated $1.1 billion for the Volunteer State from 2014 to
2019, with the costs ballooning just as the state was expecting to begin recovering from
the trauma of the past three years. “We haven’t given raises to state employees for three
years and probably won’t for three more years,” Bredesen said.
A doomsday scenario for Democrats now has them losing control of the House by an even
larger margin than the 54-seat debacle that produced Speaker Newt Gingrich. “It is well
within the realm of possibility ... that Democratic losses could climb into the 80- or 90-seat
range,” wrote Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics.

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White House officials maintain that the bleak polling numbers are not surprising and say
the liberal wing of their party — cool on Obama and crucial for midterm congressional
elections — has been reenergized.

"The President undertook health care because it was the right thing for the country even
though it was politically risky," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said.
"We don’t share the media’s obsession with poll numbers, particularly months and months
from an election. The politics of passing health care will be very good for Democrats. It’s
only in this town that not having them fully realized in a matter of days would be seen as a
failure.”

Pfeiffer added: “The president’s political standing is quite high considering that we are
governing in the worst economy in 70 years and the anti-Washington mood in the country.
He fares quite well in comparison to other presidents in similar circumstances."

Obama aides say that perceptions in the capital about Obama’s effectiveness and political
standing have been changed not just by health care, but also job growth, foreign-policy
successes and lower-than-expected costs for the bailout.

“What we got in the Beltway was a break in the losing narrative,” said one of the city’s
best-known Democratic consultants. “Obama has won something, and it was against all
odds. He had lost the health-care battle a half-dozen times, and he finally got it over the
finish line.”

Still, the state polls hold some troubling signs for the president.

In Pennsylvania, Obama’s personal approval rating is at 42 percent, compared to 49

percent who disapprove of his job performance, Susquehanna Polling and Research said
this week. And a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll earlier this month in Ohio showed Obama
eking out a 46 percent to 45 percent approval-to-disapproval rating, with only 42 percent of
independent voters approving of his job performance.

A new Associated Press-GfK poll found Americans oppose the health care overhaul 50
percent to 39 percent – worse rankings than before Congress passed the bill, when polls
were evenly split.
In Florida, where he visited Thursday, Obama is losing two critical groups on health care,
seniors and independent voters, according to a Mason-Dixon poll late last month. Nearly
two-thirds of Florida seniors oppose the health bill, with just 25 percent in favor.
Independents oppose the law by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent.

A top administration official said the battle over health reform was so bruising that “public
opinion has not caught up, but Washington’s perception is different than four weeks ago.”

The official expressed guarded hope that public perceptions may be changing too, citing
surveys showing that optimism about the economy is on the rise. Optimism about the
future, the official said, is more important than current employment figures and will allow
Democrats to argue this fall that “now is not the time to turn back.”

Out in the country, Republicans were surprisingly successful at defining health reform as a
spending bill. Democrats hope that will change as specific benefits kick in year by year.

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll, said the bill had been so widely debated

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that people had made up their minds by the time it passed. “Americans have been very
consistent in their view — tilting slightly to the negative,” he said.

President Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t get a bounce in Gallup after the passage of Medicare
and closed out 1965 in roughly the same place.

Democrats have a difference of opinion about what will happen now. One school of
thought says that by moving immediately to what the White House now calls “Wall Street
reform,” the president is teeing up a victory that will resonate more with working families —
and will give him a chance to sell them later on his health plan.

Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern, for instance, calls the latest polls
“hiccups,” and claims polling gains will come as voters feel advantages such as children
getting to stay on their parents’ insurance plans after they graduate from college in May
and June. And, he said, the “enthusiasm gap” between the parties has been erased.

But several Democrats said they fear that Obama moved on too quickly and warn urgently
that the White House needs to expend more bandwidth promoting the win. After all, White
House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel originally wanted the bill signed by November, so
Democrats would have a full year to explain and promote the bill before midterms.

“They’ve got beat the hell out of this: He’s got to get out there and sell the damn thing,”
said a top outside adviser to the White House. “Health care will not sell itself. The only
person that can really change the narrative out in the country is the president of the United
States.”

Steve Lombardo, a Republican strategist who formerly ran the polling arm of Edelman
Public Relations, said he was surprised the health vote has been such a dud for the
president but says he shouldn’t have been. “When the public is focused almost entirely on
the economy and jobs, and a president does anything other than focus on something that
is about that specifically, then the president pays a penalty for that,” Lombardo said.

Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle predicted that Obama’s approval numbers will
track unemployment figures. “There are big forces at work right now. ... The president is
doing remarkably well in Wisconsin given all the things he’s having to confront — all at the
same time. This is a long-term proposition. Even if he had a big bounce the day after, it
would go away in a week.”

T.J. Rooney, chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said the health plan is “still a bit
toxic” in the states, but urged Democrats to buck up. “Democrats need to put away the
rubber sheets and sleep in dry beds,” Rooney said. “We need to talk as passionately
about this bill as the other side does.”

Rooney said he thinks it’s going to “help immensely” to be following up with banking
reform, since it helps “draw distinctions between what Democrats are up to and what
Republicans are all about.”

Debate this story in the Arena.

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