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To put it another way: don't expect things to get better any time soon. Campaign season 2012 is off to an insanity-laced start, folks! No wonder so many across this great nation have decided that today would be a good day to celebrate tetrahydrocannabinol instead. You can see their point... through the billowing clouds of smoke.
The movement that Occupy Wall Street began is at another crossroads, it seems. It isn't the first such fork in the road, and it certainly won't be the last. What happens next is anyone's guess. Is the Occupy movement poised for a comeback? Or is it about to be co-opted altogether? Can both, in fact, happen simultaneously, and would that be a good thing or not?
We'll get to that provocative title in the Talking Points section, never fear. I felt the need for a sort of a rant this week, as well as a little humor to open it up with. Truth be told, I've been in a humorous mood all week, as evidenced by my column casting the Republican primary race so far as a climb up the polling mountain range. I think it's the spring weather or something. Since we're on the subject, though, Republican candidates seem like a good place to start today.
The rhetoric surrounding the Supreme Court and the H.H.S. v. Florida case certainly ratcheted up on both sides this week. Expect this partisan fray to get even more intense in the weeks leading up to the decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare, expected in late June. But I'm not going to get into the midst of this fray today (perhaps I will do so tomorrow, though), because I thought it would be more intelligent to review some bedrock definitions of the terms involved.
President Obama had a fairly flat month of March in the polls. His approval rating slipped back a half a point, and his disapproval rating stayed unchanged from last month. While his approval stayed above his disapproval for the month, the gap between the two is smaller than it's ever been. All month long he teetered back and forth in terms of being "above water" but showed signs of at least stabilizing by month's end. This brought an end to five straight months of good news in the polls for the president, the longest streak he's ever managed to post.
This week, the punditocracy had no Republican primary contest to distract their attention ("The upcoming primary/caucus in some state I've never traveled through because it's a flyover state could be the crucial turning point in the entire race... details at 11:00..."), and so the political pontificators and prognosticators had nothing else to talk about (one would think) except the serious business before the Supreme Court this week -- Obamacare.
Two years ago, Joe Biden was famously quoted for saying to Barack Obama upon the occasion of health care reform legislation finally passing: "This is a big [expletive deleted] deal." In the past week or so, the White House has rolled out a big media push to support Obama's signature legislation. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the subject of whether the law, as written, passes constitutional muster or not.
Sometimes I'm just astonished at the inability of political campaigns to do a simple web search. Case in point: the story about Mitt Romney's dog Seamus.
OK, quite obviously, I had to put that subtitle in quote marks, since I do not actually possess a uterus. The quote marks indicate I'm just suggesting it as a slogan for others (those of the female persuasion, of course) to utilize. Just to clear that up, in case you were wondering. But we'll get to all of that in a moment, because first we must attend to our primary chores.
President Barack Obama's job approval numbers are back "above water" (where his approval rate is higher than his disapproval number), continuing an impressive rise in the polls which began in November of last year. This is the longest run of improved public job approval Obama has managed since he got elected. Obama posted a gain of almost two full percentage points in his approval rate in February, the third-best month he's ever had in this respect (and one of the two months he posted bigger gains in was the bounce he got from Osama Bin Laden's death). He wound up the month with his approval rating a full percent better than his disapproval rating, the best numbers he's seen since last June. But this trend could be flattening out, as he ended the month of February by slipping back a bit. So in the midst of plenty of good news on the polling front for Obama, there is reason for caution as well. Call it the dark lining to a very silver cloud, if you will.