The Democrats still haven't figured out that legislating as if their only priority is to keep their jobs is what makes so many voters want them gone:

The problem for Democrats is that voters have given them virtually no credit for these ambitious projects. The 111th Congress has the lowest average approval rating (19 percent) of any Congress heading into a midterm election since Gallup started tracking the measure in 1974. On key agenda items, Obama receives failing grades, with 38 percent of voters approving of his handling of the economy and 40 percent approving of his health-care approach, according to Gallup.

"They have the same problem as Republicans, which is, we're just trying to make it about Democrats," GOP pollster David Winston said. "And the public is saying, 'When is someone going to tell me what they're going to do?' The onus on both parties is: What is their plan to grow the economy and create jobs?"

Republicans have said they will not have a plan until late September, when they hope to unveil an agenda tentatively called a "Commitment With America."

And I'll bet it's just as awesome as the Contract On America!

Some endangered Democrats are thankful that there is no broad national agenda to answer for, preferring to run on local issues.

"We actually don't sit around talking about the national agenda," said Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (Ariz.), a second-term lawmaker whose election could turn almost entirely on the issue of border security. "A lot of the messaging that takes place in Washington doesn't make it 2,000 miles to Arizona."

Most Democrats want to focus the rest of this year and next on the economy, setting aside other issues, such as immigration reform, until job creation rebounds.

"Other major initiatives are in second place, need to stay on the sideline, until we get the economy back fully in gear," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But Democrats find themselves in a box. Soaring annual deficits have made it fiscally and politically treacherous to propose another huge stimulus, leaving limited options for job creation.

Unless, of course, you saw it as part of your job to explain and lead... hah hah, just kidding!

So House Democrats are proposing less-ambitious proposals: a "Make It in America" plan, which closes tax benefits for businesses shipping jobs overseas and provides new hiring credits to local small businesses, and a proposal that would impose penalties on China for currency manipulation, the sort of measure that has often fallen flat in the free-trading Senate.

Obama and some Democrats also want to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2 percent of income earners, which would save more than $600 billion over 10 years. But some senior Democrats, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Kent Conrad (N.D.), argue against raising any taxes while the economy is teetering on the brink of a double-dip recession. And the Democrats' plan to extend the middle-class portion of those tax cuts would increase deficits by around $3 trillion over the next decade.

I swear to God, their messaging on the subject of the deficit is abysmal. For instance: If you lost your job, would your family stop eating food to save money? How sensible would that be?

Deficit spending is a good idea when it's the right kind of spending. Chocolate bars and video games? Wrong kind. Gas in the tank to get to work? Right kind! Stimulus spending is gas in the tank.

It's really not that difficult -- assuming you're not an idiot, I mean.

CBS NEWS/NEW YORK TIMES POLL - June 16, 2005

BUSH'S JOB APPROVAL

Now 5/2005 5/2004

Approve 42% 46% 41%

Disapprove 51 48 52

Bush's job approval dropped significantly since last month among people aged 30 to 44, from 52% to 40% now. Approval among those in middle-income households (incomes between $30,000 and $50,000) also dropped, from 46% in May to 40% now. Bush also lost ground among white Catholics.

However, the President retains the approval of some key constituent groups. More than 8 in ten Republicans approve of the job he is doing, unchanged in the past month, as do about 7 in ten white evangelical Christians. About two in three conservatives approve of him.

On Iraq, the President's 37% approval rating (not much different from the 38% he received last month) is also similar to the low ratings he received last summer. The percentage of Americans who say taking military action against Iraq was the right thing to do is now at 45%, matching the lowest level ever found in this poll. 51% think the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq.

U.S. MILITARY ACTION IN IRAQ

Now Approval among those in middle-income households (incomes between $30,000 and $50,000) also dropped, from 46% in May to 40% now. Bush also lost ground among white Catholics.

U.S. MILITARY ACTION IN IRAQ

Now 4/2005 1/2005 10/2004

Right thing 45% 47% 45% 53%

Should have stayed out 51 48 49 42

By 60% to 40%, Americans think things are going badly for the U.S. in Iraq rather than well.

Bush's approval ratings on specific issues are also low, in some cases approaching all-time lows for this President. Even when it comes to terrorism, the President's strongest issue, approval has dropped 6 points since last month, and now is just above last year's lowest rating of 51% on this issue.

BUSH'S JOB APPROVALS

Approve Disapprove

Overall 42% 51%

Right thing 45% 47% 45% 53%

Should have stayed out 51 48 49 42

By 60% to 40%, Americans think things are going badly for the U.S. in Iraq rather than well.

BUSH'S JOB APPROVALS

Approve Disapprove

Overall 42% 51%

Campaign against terrorism 52% 40%

The economy 39% 56%

Foreign policy 39% 51%

War in Iraq 37% 59%

Handling Social Security 25% 62%

The President fares worst when it comes to opinion of his handling of Social Security. Despite Bush's months-long promotion of his plan for Social Security, only one in four Americans approves of the way he is handling the issue.

In addition, two in three Americans are uneasy about Bush's approach to Social Security; only 27% have confidence in his ability to deal with it. Even some (but not most) Republicans are skeptical. 32% of Republicans disapprove of Bush's handling of the issue, and 35% are uneasy about his approach.

Campaign against terrorism 52% 40%

The economy 39% 56%

Foreign policy 39% 51%

War in Iraq 37% 59%

Handling Social Security 25% 62%

The President fares worst when it comes to opinion of his handling of Social Security. Despite Bush's months-long promotion of his plan for Social Security, only one in four Americans approves of the way he is handling the issue.

In addition, two in three Americans are uneasy about Bush's approach to Social Security; only 27% have confidence in his ability to deal with it. Even some (but not most) Republicans are skeptical. 32% of Republicans disapprove of Bush's handling of the issue, and 35% are uneasy about his approach.

BUSH'S HANDLING OF SOCIAL SECURITY

Confident 27%

Uneasy 66

Quark Soup

Check out this major blunder, written by Misty Edgecomb of the Bangor Daily News:

Instead, the Bush administration is promoting voluntary energy efficiency and pollution reduction programs - which EPA officials estimate will reduce emissions by 18 percent over a decade without harming the economy.

Of course, it's not emissions that will decrease 18 percent over the next decade but -- emissions as a percentage of GDP. Emissions will continue to increase.

What's so bad about this is that it's precisely this type of confusion which the Administration was hoping people would make when they shifted their emphasis from emissions to emissions intensity. Reporter Misty Edgecomb fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Don't miss these stories  Kicking Ass

Don't miss some important stories coming out of the DNC today:

• Governor Dean announced a huge investment in state parties, beginning with a half million dollars to four states as a pilot program that will go national.
• Dean called on Dennis Hastert to stop protecting the scandal-ridden Tom DeLay and to restore the power of the Ethics Committee to conduct meaningful investigations.
• Americans are growing more and more wary of Republicans, according to three different new polls. President Bush's approval ratings are dropping, and Americans strongly disapprove of the recent behavior of GOP leaders.

emissions intensity -- emissions as a percentage of GDP. Emissions will continue to increase.

What's so bad about this is that it's precisely this type of confusion which the Administration was hoping people would make when they shifted their emphasis from emissions to emissions intensity. Reporter Misty Edgecomb fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Kicking Ass

Don't miss some important stories coming out of the DNC today:

• Governor Dean announced a huge investment in state parties, beginning with a half million dollars to four states as a pilot program that will go national.
• Dean called on Dennis Hastert to stop protecting the scandal-ridden Tom DeLay and to restore the power of the Ethics Committee to conduct meaningful investigations.
• Americans are growing more and more wary of Republicans, according to three different new polls. President Bush's approval ratings are dropping, and Americans strongly disapprove of the recent behavior of GOP leaders.

(h/t TPM)

Glowing in the news of a resurgence of his approval rating, President Obama tried to pass some of that popularity onto his party and tried to remind supporters that the upcoming midterm elections do have consequences. Frustration at the incumbency shouldn't mean giving Republicans the wheel again:

After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No. You can't drive. We don't want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.

Damn straight, we can't afford to go into that ditch again.

I completely understand the level of frustration; I feel it too. But I also know that the choice to sit this election out or to go to third party candidates (and I say this as a registered third-party voter) is to hand the keys of the car back to the same guys who drove us into that ditch.

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Health care reform is going to be the law of the land when the President signs it in to law tomorrow morning. When that happens, good things happen for individuals, small businesses and senior citizens. You'd think this would be what the media was talking about. But no, as John King demonstrates, what CNN deems important is the GOP threat to repeal health care reform.

KING: "Wall to Wall" tonight, a look at the next chapter in the health care political debate. The Democratic plan will soon be the law of the land. But a majority of Americans tell us they don't like it. And as the president hits the road again to sell it, the big question is whether passage of this landmark proposal gives him a political bounce. There is no doubt, check this out, that he could use one. Let's take a look at the president's approval rating since taking office. We'll go back to the beginning here and watch as this plays out.

In a remarkable exchange with former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers and former Mitt Romney* communications director Kevin Madden, King leads off by pointing to the full 2,074-page bill while holding Michelle Bachmann's newly-introduced measure to repeal the bill. Despite DeeDee Myers' best efforts to focus the discussion on what reform really means to every American, Kevin Madden (with King's assistance) drives the debate back to vague, unsubstantiated lies and right-wing rumors.

No matter how many times Myers tries to tick off benefits of reform, Madden continues to spout the latest Luntz talking points with John King's full blessing. The most remarkable comment comes from Madden at about 3:30, where Myers points out that on Wednesday morning, the majority of Americans will wake up and discover they have the very same health insurance they had last week.

Madden's response? "The American people have been sold a bill of goods...they're going to expect something now."

Well, yes. Exactly. And what will happen when they get it? Who is selling the bill of goods here? As facts turn to reality, and people see benefits like small businesses getting tax credits and senior citizens saving money on prescription drugs, who will they believe sold them that bill of goods?

Please, Republicans, keep selling that repeal message. Sell it hard so we can elect an even bigger Democratic majority in November.

*corrected

I watch many of the Sunday talk shows, and have been doing so for over five years. My brain is developing soft tissue on my frontal lobe, and after viewing this week's installment, the damaged tissue is spreading fast.

If you tuned in to the Villagers, they practically called for Obama's resignation.

Digby and Heather noticed the same thing.

In case you were wondering, the consensus on all the Sunday gasbag shows is that Obama is an abject failure because of his radical leftist ideology and that his only hope of even maintaining the presidency, much less winning a second term is to take a sharp turn to the right and enact the Republican agenda. Several commentators, including such luminaries as political cross dresser Matthew Dowd on ABC, insisted that the first thing the president has to do is pick a huge fight with the Democrats to show the country that he isn't one of them. Cokie said he should have asked John McCain from the beginning what he was allowed to do.

The historians and expert political observers on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show all agreed that Obama is no Reagan, a president who never governed ideologically and always worked across party lines. Oh, and he needs to be a president or a prime minister, but nobody could agree on exactly what that means except that he should try to be more like Scott Brown, the white Barack Obama, except without all the liberalism.

Oddly, the Republicans weren't mentioned, although Robert Caro did note that Obama inherited something of a mess. Peggy Noonan said he ran to win not to govern and they all agreed that was a brilliant observation. Zakaria did point out that Obama had a higher approval rating at this stage than both Reagan and Clinton and that the two Bush's were higher at this point because of wars and they all stared for a moment and then went on about centrism and prime ministers again.

The Village has officially turned. I'm guessing they'll be calling for his resignation by July.

The Republicans can do no wrong. I'm not saying Axelrod has done a good job, but the conservatives filibustered everything they could. And then they lie about it. Mr. Waterloo shouldn't be allowed back on TV until he admits he lied.

OK, here's what he said:

And now he lies:

I'm waiting for the Beltway media elites to tell Obama that he must appoint a Republican to the White House so Obama can learn how to govern.

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The disgraced man once known as Bush's Brain actually has the nerve to say that the reason President Obama's poll numbers are slipping is because he's wasting time trying to fix our broken f*&king health care system and that's not one of the real "bread and butter" issues that Americans care about.

This from the man who led George W. Bush from an 80% approval rating to one of the lowest approval ratings in the history of America. And George Bush is considered one of the worst President in American history... Oh, yeah, and Karl couldn't help but drool all over himself when he said that Obama is focusing on climate change and never stops talking about his Nobel Peace Prize. When have you ever heard the president mention his prize outside of when he won it, and now that he's picking it up? What a liar.

Rove: ..and he's spent this year talking about health care and talking about greenhouse gas emissions and the environment and his Nobel Peace Prize and not talking about the thing that Americans are concerned about, which is jobs and the economy...

BillO: Bread and butter issues.

You may not agree with some of the measures President Obama has taken in dealing with the economy or health care for that matter, but he's certainly addressed it.

Forget George W. Bush for a minute. Well, you can never forget what he's done to our country so please don't. Ronald Reagan's popularity hit the skids early on in his presidency about the same time as Obama's has, when unemployment jumped under his leadership. Of course, Reagan didn't have a global financial catastrophe and two wars to deal with at the time, either.

Andrew Kohut writes:

The new president described above is, of course, Barack Obama — but, to a startling degree, it is also Ronald Reagan. A close look at Gallup’s polling of reactions to Reagan’s first few months in office provides striking parallels with what Pew Research Center polls now find about opinions of Mr. Obama. And a consideration of the Reagan experience may well give some clues as to what lies ahead for the 44th president.

The public’s bottom lines on Presidents Reagan and Obama early in their presidencies have so far been quite comparable: 60 percent and 59 percent of the public approved of the new presidents in mid-March, respectively. (Going into April, the lines diverge as a sympathetic public response to the March 31 attempt on Reagan’s life boosted his numbers, at least for short period.)---

But the public’s patience with Reagan was relatively short lived. By November, when the jobless rate had risen to 8.3 percent, from 7.5 percent in January, a plurality of the public believed that Reaganomics would hurt, not help, their family finances. So began Ronald Reagan’s approval ratings slide. By December, according to Gallup, 49 percent approved of his job performance while 41 percent disapproved. With the economy faltering, his approval rating fell to 42 percent by July 1982, with 46 percent disapproving. His rating hit a low of 35 percent early the next year.

So BillO's claim that Obama's polls are lower than anyone's in history at this point in his presidency is bogus: Obama's poll numbers, in fact, are closely tracking Reagan's.

And Reagan didn't have a black helicopter-teabagger movement created by a liberal version of FOX News or psycho talk radio that actively sought to overthrow him to deal with either.

Only FOX News would give Karl Rove a job as a lead analyst because they so desperately want the Democratic Party out of power and want to make their audience forget all about George W. Bush. Nice try, you political hacks.

Dean Baker makes an astute observation:

Okay, I'm not on vacation, but this is a BTP flashback. My original write-up of this NYT news article was way too positive. This article was essentially a diatribe against Germany's welfare state. To make its case, it turned an incredible success story -- Germany's relatively low unemployment rate -- into a failure.

The basic deal is that Germany adopted an explicit policy of encouraging employers to shorten work hours rather than lay off workers. The government allows unemployment benefits to be used to pay workers to cover most of the loss in wages due to the shorter workweek.

As a result, Germany's unemployment rate has barely changed in the downturn. Its unemployment rate at present is 7.7 percent. This is down from 7.8 percent earlier in the year. Germany's unemployment rate in 2007 was 8.4 percent, 0.7 percentage points higher than the current level.

This is an incredible success story. Imagine Barack Obama's approval rating if the unemployment rate today was anywhere close to its 4.7 percent average for 2007. Think of the millions of unemployed workers who would not be struggling to pay their rent or mortgages or meet other bills if only our leaders were as smart as Germany's leaders. We could do something along the same lines in the U.S.

But NYT readers will be spared such thoughts because the article described the policy as a complete failure. To make its case, the NYT even used the German government's measurement of unemployment (which counts part-time workers as being unemployed) rather than the harmonized OECD measure that is directly comparable to the unemployment data in the United States.

This was not news reporting.

Dean is one of the best economists we have.

Bob Dole was told to keep his trap shut by non other than the odious Mitch McConnell, the man who has as an approval rating as low as Dick Cheney's.

The GOP’s 1996 candidate for president said he was asked by current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., not to issue a bipartisan statement calling for passage of health care reform legislation.

“We’re already hearing from some high-ranking Republicans that we shouldn’t do that — that’s helping the president,” Dole said. He later specified that the people he referred to included one “very prominent Republican, who happens to be the Republican leader of the Senate,” according to The Kansas City Star .Dole was also quoted as saying that partisanship by his own GOP was behind the delay in reaching agreement on a final health care bill..

I don't expect Dole to suddenly go on the air and rip into his party, but the fact that this much got out says a lot. The republicans have no plan for health care reform so any words that come from older republicans on the hot topic carries a sting to it.

Mitch will be on Face the Nation today and I wonder if Bob Schieffer will bring it up or read a David Brooks column. Maybe they'll just want to talk about the Nobel Peace prize. What do you think?