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Some weeks, I sit down to write this weekly wrapup, and find that there isn't that much to talk about, because nothing much happened that particular week.
OK, with that out of the way, let's have a look at March's polling. President Obama lost almost all the ground he had gained late in the 2012 election season, and his numbers fell back to where he was roughly six months ago. This isn't as bad as some media have made it out to be, since it may represent Obama's true natural level of support. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's take a look at this month's chart:
Senator Marco Rubio, Cuban-American from Florida, is now officially "on deck." He is idly swinging a practice bat back and forth, in anticipation of his first real major-league performance. This moment, it should be noted, has taken a long time to get here. Rubio was elected to the Senate, after all, in the Great Tea Party Shellacking Of 2010. He's had over two years in the Senate now but has yet to put his stamp of approval on any comprehensive immigration legislation, even though he treats it as his own private issue within the Republican Party. Rubio enjoys being seen as "working hard" on some sort of legislative breakthrough on immigration, but up until now, that breakthrough has never actually happened. There's a good reason for that, and the reason is that his fellow Tea Party Republicans (mostly over in the House) are quite content to have Marco Rubio "working hard" on an immigration bill, but they're never going to support anything he actually comes up with. By supporting Rubio "working hard" on the issue, they can conveniently do nothing and (they hope) defuse the issue among the voters.
The big news towards the end of the week was "stupid things Republicans say," of course, but we're saving most of that for the "Talking Points" part of the program.
Welcome to the 250th Friday Talking Points column!
Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus is in the news this week, for his "autopsy" report on the Republican Party in the 2012 election. Priebus and a few other hardy Republican souls took months to examine what went wrong for the party, and what should be done to set things right for the next time around. Their prescription for change, unfortunately, is to change how their message is delivered rather than to change much in the way of Republican policies. I'm certainly not the first to point this out, but this idea works out to exactly the same as what you are left with when you remove the vowels from the national party chairman's name: RNC PR BS.
President Obama changed political gears last week, and decided to take a new direction in his dealings with Republicans in Congress. This "charm offensive" will either later be seen as a meaningless photo-op gesture, or a brilliant strategic maneuver on the political chessboard. Time will tell. That golf game with John Boehner didn't really gain Obama much, to put it another way. But the political winds are a-changin' in Washington (as they tend to do), and if Obama is really serious about developing personal relationships with those in the opposition party who might possibly be open to deal-cutting, this time around a charm offensive might bear some political fruit. Obama is attempting a bold plan to exploit the existing disarray in the Republican Party, and largely bypass the entire Republican congressional leadership. If it works (and even, possibly, if it fails), this will only serve to widen the chasms within the GOP right in time for the next election. That's some pretty juicy political fruit indeed.
Our column's subtitle this week is a silent homage to guitarist Alvin Lee of the band Ten Years After, who sadly died this past week. Anyone who has seen the movie Woodstock knows of Lee's incredible talent on the electric guitar, and we just wanted to begin by noting that Alvin Lee is "Goin' Home" for the last time. Requiescat In Pace.
Obama's approval ratings saw a sharp drop last month. The sharpest drop, in fact, since the summer of 2011, right before the campaign started getting underway. His average monthly approval fell from 52.7 percent down to 51.1 percent, a total drop of 1.6 percentage points. This followed a 0.4 percent drop in January, for a full two-point drop in the past two months.
Republican politicians seem to be making less sense than usual these days, especially when the subject being discussed is President Obama. No matter what Obama does -- or does not do -- it is wrong, according to Republicans. Oh, and everything bad is Obama's fault -- can't forget that one, either.