Democrats on the Defensive

[Geee]

National Review:

Democrats on the Defensive
The stimulus and the health-care bill are no longer a net plus for the Democrats.


Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by his pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.

In his campaign in 2008, and as president in 2009 and 2010, he has hoped that those he characterized to a rich San Francisco Bay–area audience as bitterly clinging to guns and God would be won over by programs to stimulate the economy and provide guaranteed health insurance.

At least so far, it hasn’t worked, as witnessed by recent statements by some of the Democrats’ smartest thinkers.
The 2009 stimulus package is so unpopular that Democrats have banned the word from their campaign vocabulary. “I’m not supposed to call it stimulus,” Rep. Barney Frank told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. “The message experts in Washington have told us that we’re supposed to call it the recovery plan.”

“I’m puzzled by that,” Frank went on. “Most people would rather be stimulated than recover.” The problem is, the economy has neither been stimulated nor recovered.

As for the health-care bill, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has been pondering Democrats’ standing with working-class voters since his perceptive 1980s studies of Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Mich., has pretty much thrown in the towel.

[AceRimmer]

Mike Barone might be the smartest person in Washington. He elegantly outlines why Obambi's poll numbers(and the RATS) are falling through the floor.

 

When Barone talks, I usually stop and listen.