There's certainly a sense that Republicans may have bottomed out and at least started to look for a way out of the wilderness. We've thought as much before only to see the party rocked by some ridiculous sex scandal or to watch helplessly as Obama's numbers climb in tandem with the Dow, but suddenly the market is back to where it was when Obama came in and the unemployment number is rising and the public mood seems to have turned against the tax and spend liberalism of the stimulus, cap and trade, and a $3.4 trillion budget.
Ben Smith captures the mood in a piece today looking at the polling trends that are giving Republicans hope:
In a potentially alarming trend for the White House, independent voters are deserting President Barack Obama nationally and especially in key swing states, recent polls suggest.
Obama's job approval rating hit a - still healthy - low of 56 percent in the Gallup Poll on Wednesday. And pollsters are debating whether Obama's expansive and expensive policy proposals or the ground-level realities of a still-faltering economy are driving the falling numbers.
But a source of the shift appears to be independent voters, who seem to be responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending and government control.
Meanwhile, Democrats have gone on offense (they actually put out a statement yesterday titled "Dems Go on Offense on Stimulus") touting the stimulus as a having "created/saved" thousands of jobs around the country and attacking any Republican who suggests otherwise. The DNC blasted Mike Pence for trying to "deliberately deceive the American public" by saying "the only thing the stimulus plan has stimulated is more government debt." The DNC has also gone after two Republican Congressional hopefuls, Steve Stivers in Ohio's 15th District and Dorothy Hukill in Florida's 24th District, who are planning to challenge Democrat incumbents largely on the basis of their votes in favor of Obama's stimulus. Both releases touted spending that would be funneled to each respective district as a result of the stimulus, but these Republican challengers are obviously trying to ride a wave that the polls are already beginning to show -- what Ben Smith describes as a shift among independents who are responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending.
At the national level, Democrats are looking to push back hard on the stimulus and reverse a growing perception that the money is being wasted while the economy falters and debt accumulates. But at the local level, Democrats facing tough races may not be so eager to make the case for the stimulus. It will be interesting to see whether some of these Democrats start separating themselves from their leadership on health care and cap and trade, and whether they start blaming Obama for the shortcomings of the stimulus as John Murtha did yesterday, telling his constituents that "he would not have created the stimulus package the way President Barack Obama designed it." The DNC ought to blast Murtha for trying to deceive the American public, because I was under the impression that it wasn't Obama but Pelosi who wrote the bill.
