That Was in Fact a Huge Win for Obama Last Week

By Frank Rich, The New York Times. Posted February 16, 2009.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama "losing control," also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to "generational theft." F.D.R.'s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus's popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington's condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can't create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president's job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) -- not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that "perhaps we've overanalyzed it, we don't know what we're talking about." But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating "victory." Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus's unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that "the House Republicans' zero votes for the Obama presidency's stimulus 'package' is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.'s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties." There hasn't been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party's hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele's argument against the stimulus package is that "in the history of mankind" no "federal, state or local" government has ever "created one job." As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

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