SOTU: A Return to American Values

25 January 2012 |permalink | email article

President Obama won’t be visiting Kansas soon again but the class-struggle theme he struck there last month in a speech modeled on Theodore Roosevelt’s fairness philosophy formed the basis of his election-year State of the Union address Tuesday night. In a campaign video previewed last Saturday he called for “a Return to American Values—of economic fairness for all and responsibility from all”—a direct reference to his plan to raise taxes on high-income earners. The core of the speech—taking place against the background of a superheated Republican presidential primary—were proposals for new industrial and energy programs and strategies to retrain workers. How successful he will be with a hostile Republican House majority bent on slashing government spending and obstructing him any successes. While a majority of Americans give him failing grades on the economy, his goal will be to shift the conversation of his record to a choice between competing alternatives—portraying Republicans as enemies of the middle class while positioning himself as an ally of working families. i>More: A new ABC News-Washington Post poll, on the night Obama addressed the nation, has some good news for him and bad news for his two major rivals seeking the Republican nomination. While unfavorable views of Mitt Romney have soared, doubts about Newt Gingrich remain widespread Obama has advanced to his highest personal popularity in more than a year—53 percent of Americans express a favorable opinion of the president overall, up by 5 points from last month to the most favorable since April 2010. Forty-nine percent of Americans now see Romney unfavorably, a new high in the ABC/Post this cycle. This far outstrips his favorable rating, 31 percent, down 8 points to a new low. The shift has been led by independents, swing voters in national politics. Gingrich has also lost ground, dropping 6 points in favorability since December—and with more than half of Americans, 51 percent now seeing him unfavorably, up from the low 40s last fall. The poll indicates that the sharpest shifts have been among independents. Unfavorable opinions of Romney have soared by 17 percent in this group since Jan. 8 among independents in the same group while unfavorable opinions have dropped; favorable opinions have dropped by 18 points among independents in the same group to just 23 percent.  Gingrich has lost 11 percent among independents since December, to 22 percent favorability. By contrast, Obama gets a 51 percent favorable rating from independents.

Quotable

“He didn’t have the votes. That was the problem.”—Rep. Ron Paul, mocking Gingrich’s version of
why he resigned as House Speaker after the 1998 midterms, during the Tampa debate Monday night.

“Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941.”—In late December, when it was announced that Gingrich had failed to qualify for the Virginia primary, a campaign official compared the blow to Pearl Harbor. Frank Bruni, New York Times.

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