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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jules Witcover
After months of blaming George W. Bush for the economic hole the country is in, and blaming the Republicans as the Party of No for not helping to dig it out, President Obama has finally begun to take a different tack.
He and his surrogates on the campaign trail are now busily selling his administration's accomplishments, so severely assaulted by
With a prod from Vice President Joe Biden to stop "whining" and to start doing a better job explaining what has been achieved in Obama's 20 months of tenure, the Democrats are pivoting to statistical and moral defenses on varying fronts, from job-saving to expanded health care.
The president and struggling congressional incumbents alike have been trumpeting the job benefits from local and state roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects financed with stimulus package funds. And they have begun reminding voters of such immediate health-care bounties as the end to denials on pre-existing medical conditions and the extension of coverage for dependents through age 26.
Clearly it's a hard sell in a stubborn economic recovery, whose greatest challenge is the persisting national unemployment rate of almost 10 percent. But the latest public opinion surveys indicate some traction for the Democrats against a widely predicted political disaster on Nov. 2.
The latest
Furthermore, registered voters gave Democratic incumbents in
The tardy Democratic strategy of accentuating the positive in the Obama legislative record is an effort to counter the relentless assault on it by a Republican congressional leadership, which has marched its membership in lockstep against virtually every major Obama proposal.
One element of the intensified Democratic response was the detailed assessment Biden gave last week as the administration's overseer of the progress of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. As the
The report said that by the end of September, 70 percent of the original amount, or
The bulk of the outlay, the report said, included
A significant finding of the report was the low evidence of fraud in doling out these huge amounts of taxpayer money, with allegations against less than 2 percent of the payouts made. But even Biden's principal economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, in commenting on the report, acknowledged that more had to be done publicizing it to have any appreciable influence on next month's voting.
Still, the latest polling data, as well as historical trends of political loyalists "coming home" to their party and of rates as high as 95 percent of congressional incumbents retaining their seats, are fanning Democrats' hopes of weathering the impending negative storm against them so widely predicted.
Available at Amazon.com:
The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
AMERICAN POLITICS
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Obama Accentuating the Positive | Politics
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