Josh Gerstein of Politico jumps on the news that caught the attention of a lot of online political observers Friday: “President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have dipped below 50 percent for the first time in one prominent poll amid a raft of bad news about the economy and continuing job losses. The nation’s economic woes pushed Obama down to a 49 percent approval rating in the respected Gallup daily tracking poll out Friday. Gallup said Obama’s approval rating had been holding in the low 50s since September but hasn’t dropped below 50 percent until now.” Gerstein puts it in perspective: “One veteran pollster, Syracuse University’s Jeffrey Stonecash, said the steep decline is the result of unreasonably inflated expectations about what Obama could accomplish in Washington….Stonecash also said he sees no recovery for Obama’s numbers unless and until the economy rebounds. Asked if passage of health care will give the president a boost, the professor said, ‘No. The economy has got to turn around. Seems to me this is very much like Ronald Reagan in 1980 where he knew the economy was going to cost some members their seats in ’82 and he waited, hoping it would come around by the time he faced re-election. Obama’s hoping all’s going well by the time we get to 2011.’”

Meantime, Michael Crowley of The New Republic urges folks to cut the president some slack on foreign affairs. Crowley notes that Obama is sometimes blamed “personally for a lack of tangible U.S. foreign policy achievements since January,” including “his empty-handed departure from China. “ But about that Asia trip, Crowley continues: “Okay, he didn’t achieve breakthroughs on global warming and Iran sanctions. But you just can’t snap your fingers and win concessions from a nation with enormous financial leverage over us. Sure, Obama soft-peddled human rights while there. But while you can argue with that calculation, it’s a matter of strategy that has little to do with the beef about his biography-centric foreign policy….So, give the man some more time. Obama has major decisions ahead on issues over which he has more control: Afghanistan, Iran, and where he will finally draw the line on Israeli settlement policy. Judge him by those landmarks, not the hollow staged diplomacy of the past few days.”

Meantime, the editors of National Review offer a pretty concise view of the conservative position on health-care legislation: Don’t amend it, kill it. “Harry Reid offers the nation a mephitic Senate health-care bill that retains the worst features of Nancy Pelosi’s creation and adds fresh horrors of its own: It will force Americans to finance abortions and jack up some Americans’ Medicare taxes by 34 percent. On paper, the House bill costs a little more than $1 trillion, the Senate bill a little less than $1 trillion; more realistic estimates, minus the congressional accounting chicanery, put the price tag of each closer to $2 trillion over the first ten years of implementation.” The editors then turn up the heat on moderate Democratic Senators, starting with “Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who has the opportunity to stop this bill from going to the Senate floor for advancement.” In her doubts about the bill, “Senator Lincoln is joined in these concerns by two other prominent moderate Democrats, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who are rightly skeptical of this $1 trillion experiment…If there remains such a thing as Democratic moderation, now is the time for Senators Lincoln, Nelson, and Landrieu to show their true colors. This is their hour.”

As Rodney King once said, famously and in a quite different context, “Can we all get along?”

Mr. King, the victim of a police beating in Los Angeles, was referring to race relations, of course. But the same plea now could be applied to relations between the Obama administration and the business community.

That relationship, once so promising, has given way to an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion, as evident from the comments of executives this week at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council, a gathering in Washington of about a hundred of the nation’s top chief executives.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and some tentative steps may have been taken at the Council meetings to begin changing the atmosphere. If the tenor persists, though, it has real consequences, especially in missed opportunities to cooperate on jobs, education and the deficit.

Today’s tone is strikingly different than it was just one year ago, when the Journal first brought together the nation’s top CEOs in Washington in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election. The magnitude of the economic crisis was becoming clearer, and the business leaders were virtually leaning forward in their seats, seeking help and reassurance as representatives of the new administration appeared.

See the full column here.

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, is a former White House correspondent with two decades of experience covering Washington government and politics. Click here for Mr. Brown’s full bio.

Sometimes ordinary individuals, just following their hearts, strike a chord with the American people, and a wave of public admiration turns them into celebrities.

We would be better off as a society, especially as we enter the holiday season, if that happens to Leigh Anne Tuohy. That would mean the country might have a conversation with itself about the importance of individual responsibility.

Mrs. Tuohy is a white, very evangelical Christian, who was raised by a racist father. She lives in wealthy, white suburban Memphis, the kind of place some social critics like to look down at with jaundiced eyes and knowing glances.

But she did something extraordinary a few years back, something difficult to imagine many who look disapprovingly at her Christian lifestyle would do.

She literally took a 350-pound, illiterate and practically mute, black kid off the streets where he had lived for years into her very fancy home.

Because her husband’s high school classmate wrote a book about the Tuohy family’s experience, Mrs. Tuohy has already become semi-famous to the relatively small book-reading world. But when the movie version of “The Blind Side” begins showing in movie theaters Friday, with her character played by Sandra Bullock, Mrs. Tuohy’s actions will get a lot of people talking.

Leigh Anne Tuohy first saw him walking down the road on a snowy day in cutoffs and a short-sleeve shirt. Her kids said he went to their school, a Christian prep school that admitted him after a serendipitous string of events but expected him to be an academic failure.

A Place to Call Home

He had no place to live. She fed, clothed and gave him what was the first bed of his own in his entire life. Most of all, she gave him a home, the first real one he had ever had, too. She and her husband also paid for his education – including tutors who allowed him to graduate from high school and college. They taught him the rudiments of normal life that he never learned living on the streets in what is the third-poorest ZIP Code in America.

At age 16, he could barely read or write. After being socially promoted through the Memphis public schools, his awareness of the world was so minimal he didn’t know what an ocean was or a bird’s nest. In English class, “noun” was a foreign concept as was “atom” in science. In fact, he didn’t know his real name or his birthday.

Mrs. Tuohy and her husband, Sean Tuohy, eventually adopted the boy and put him in their will along with their two biological children.

As it turned out the young man, Michael Oher, became an outstanding football player. Today, he plays for the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League, and is a millionaire in his own right.

But neither the Tuohys nor anyone else had any idea that he had those athletic skills when they began a reclamation project that would make Henry Higgins’s makeover of Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” look like a breeze. You can be sure Mr. Oher wouldn’t have been living on the streets if anyone had thought he had athletic talent.

Mr. Oher had played a little football in the Memphis public schools, where he had been enrolled but rarely showed up for class. The coaches there apparently thought he was just a big, fat kid.

A Moral Duty

Let’s stipulate that she and her husband are wealthy, so they could afford to assume responsibility for feeding, clothing, educating and caring for someone with enormous needs to whom they had no real connection nor legal responsibility.

Moral responsibility, Leigh Anne Tuohy thought, was another story.

“God gives people money to see how you are going to handle it,” Mrs. Tuohy told the author, Michael Lewis. And, as Lewis put it, “She intended to prove she knew how to handle it.”

But the question remains: How many American families, even with those resources, would take into their home a humongous stranger who would barely talk, and previously had been tested with an IQ of 80, the 9th percentile of the population?

Not to mention the elephant in the room, the racial question.

It’s a reasonable bet that most middle- and upper-class Americans might have given him a few bucks for a meal, but gotten away from him as fast as they could. After all, it’s not only easy, but the norm, for us to shrug off the problems of American society without taking responsibility for changing them.

Mrs. Tuohy acted because she saw no one else was going to do it. It was, in her view, what good Christians did. And, let’s be clear here: Ms. Tuohy is very much an evangelical Christian who believes that private citizens, not their government, change things.

In an era of a growing governmental role in American society, she represents the opposite view. As her husband, who owns scores of fast-food restaurants and is the TV analyst for the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA put it, “we had a black son before we had a Democratic friend.”

Full disclosure here, I have never met Mrs. Tuohy and have not seen the film, since I am not a movie reviewer with access to early releases. Reading the book, however, brought tears to my eyes.

It’s an uplifting story, but perhaps more importantly, it’s one Americans might want to think about.

Write to Peter Brown at peter.brown@quinnipiac.edu.

Policy arguments in Washington sometimes take on an otherworldly feel — and so it is with the public wrangling over Afghanistan policy.

Outside the walls of the Obama administration, the argument has been almost entirely about numbers: How many additional troops should be sent to Afghanistan? Should it be 10,000, 20,000 or 40,000? But inside the Obama administration, say those who actually have been involved, the debate has been much less about troop levels than commonly imagined. Instead, it has much more to do with ensuring that the American troop buildup, whatever its size, isn’t open-ended.

The key for President Barack Obama, these people say, is having a plan that ensures the American presence is a prelude to, rather than a substitute for, Afghanistan taking over the security job itself. The goal is for American troops to reverse the rise of Taliban strength in the short term, buying time for Afghan President Hamid Karzai to build up security and police forces that can take over while American forces phase out.

The internal discussion, in short, is less about the size of the entrance ramp than the location of the exit ramp.

Seeing the debate this way helps decode what seem to be the riddles in the Obama administration’s long pause for a policy review before deciding what steps to take next. President Obama, who has a plateful of other security issues to worry about as well, ordered a rethink because he feared the military plan for a buildup, whatever its other virtues, seemed open-ended.

See the full column here.

That becomes more clear from a state-by-state unemployment forecast just released by the U.S. Regional Services Group of IHS Global Insight economic consulting firm. “Although IHS Global Insight believes that the great recession has ended, job market recovery will be painfully slow,” the firm says. “Though employment will start to expand across most of the country in the first half of 2010, it will take another three years, to the second quarter of 2013, before half the states have recovered their job losses and regained their previous peak employment levels.”

More intriguing is the list of politically sensitive an important states that figure to be having significant unemployment problems right through the 2012 presidential campaign. IHS forecases that 10 states, including the political important states of California, Michigan, and Ohio, “will still be suffering with unemployment in excess of 9%” into 2013.

Oh, and while New Hampshire, home of the nation’s first primary, is forecast to return to “peak employment” by 2012, Iowa, home of the nation’s first caucses, won’t get there until 2013, IHS forecasts.

The last thing Democrats need right now is a fight over health care with a powerful group that ought to be an ally in the struggle to pass a bill.

Yet that’s exactly what may be taking shape with the nation’s Catholic bishops. The reason: The party’s liberal wing is trying to force a retreat from a deal struck in the House to ensure that federal funds aren’t used for abortions under a health-care overhaul. It’s an argument nobody seems to really want, over a subject almost everybody would like to avoid, yet it hangs overhead like a cloud that won’t quite go away.

This is an ironic twist, because just a few days ago it appeared that, almost miraculously, the House had succeeded in taking abortion out of the health debate, while also winning the votes of a crucial bloc of moderate Democrats and turning the bishops into one of the most potent groups of cheerleaders for getting a new plan into law.

If that seemed too good to be true, it probably was. The pivotal moment came last weekend, when the House, in the final stages of debate over its version of health legislation, passed an amendment authored by Michigan Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak that blocked abortions — except in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother — from being covered by a government-run health-insurance plan, or by any insurance plans bought with the help of government subsidies.

See the full column here.

Reihan Salam on the Daily Beast, bores in on Afghan President Hamid Karzai, taking off from reports of cables from U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry suggesting withholding more troops until Karzi’s performance improves. The White House relationship with Karzai “is badly broken, and it’s hard to see how it can be fixed. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s explosive call to rethink a troop increase in Afghanistan has renewed doubts within the Obama administration and the larger Democratic foreign-policy community about whether Karzai’s government, in its current incarnation, is worth fighting and dying for. And though the president seems to be inching towards a substantial troop increase, these nagging doubts have led to a call for a narrower, more defined commitment to Afghanistan.”
The fear, Salam continues, is “that the U.S. mission has become ‘too big to fail,’ and that Karzai, like a profligate Wall Street tycoon, is taking the American taxpayer for a ride without making the painful sacrifices necessary to create a viable nation-state.”

Speaking of those Eikenberry cables, Laura Rozen of Politico wonders who leaked them and why—and bores in on White House officials skeptical of a troop buildup. The disclosure seems “to demonstrate continued Obama White House resistance to getting railroaded by the generals to a set of options that all include increasing the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, from an additional 10,000 to an additional 40,000 troops,” she writes. The cables, word of which was spead “seemingly by U.S. officials in the White House itself, raise the concerrn to Obama that the U.S. cannot succeed in Afghanistan with the current attitude and even contempt displayed by newly reelected Afghan president Hamid Karzai….So who wanted to gist of Eikenberry’s classified advice to Obama to reach the public?’ The [White House] political operation is using him to push back [against the] Pentagon,” one Democratic foreign policy hand suggested.”

Joe Klein of Time, meanwhile, wants Obama to take his time and keep asking deep questions. Afghanistan “is different from Iraq. It is much poorer, vastly illiterate, governmentally incoherent and spectacularly corrupt — and its President, Hamid Karzai, shows no signs of the growth in office that Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki achieved (another mystery). In addition, the U.S. military has made some serious strategic mistakes in Afghanistan this year…Most of the attention the past few weeks has gone to numbers: How many more troops will the President send to Afghanistan? But there is a more important question: How long will he send them for? The military planners assume a five-to-10-year commitment. A more reasonable strategy would be to focus on the next year and see if there’s any progress. Can the Afghan troops be trained? Will the Karzai government buckrake, or cooperate? Who are the Taliban, anyway? I’d send more trainers, and more troops to Kandahar, immediately, to give the effort its best chance to succeed. But the President should be as rigorous in evaluating the progress of counterinsurgency as the military was in formulating it.”

A new report from the Pew Center on the States and Pew’s Stateline.org delivers a graphic reminder. California’s fiscal mess is well known, but the report looks at nine other states that are at risk of sliding down the same slippery slope.

Stateline’s summary: “All of California’s neighbors–Arizona, Nevada and Oregon–and fellow Sun Belt state Florida were severely hit by the bursting housing bubble, landing them on Pew’s list of states facing fiscal difficulties similar to California’s. A Midwestern cluster of states comprising Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin emerged, too, as did the Northeastern states of New Jersey and Rhode Island.”

It is, in short, a surpringly diverse group of states in peril. As Obama administration officials are well aware, the consequences are potentially profound for the other 40 states as well. States strapped for cash cut back on their own spending, which drags down the economy at the grass roots even as it’s trying to speed up at the national level. And states coping with lower tax receipts and higher costs for social services during a time of unemployment just might have to raise taxes to balance their budgets, potentially cancelling out all that stimulus spending from Washington.

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, is a former White House correspondent with two decades of experience covering Washington government and politics. Click here for Mr. Brown’s full bio.

Whether the American people -– and their elected representatives -– understand that one puzzle piece doesn’t make a picture is a key question now that the unemployment rate has crossed the bright red line into double digits.

Jobless numbers are considered a trailing economic indicator, but there is a potential they will become the controlling story of the economy, even though other statistics show early signs of a recovery.

That’s not to underestimate the woe unemployment can cause for a family and for the country. But history tells us that other measurements are much better at predicting a society’s economic health.

Double-digit joblessness leading the news for many months to come could create an atmosphere that results in public and political change that might not be the best thing for nurturing the nascent economic recovery. Other than the geeks with the slide rules, most Americans consider the economy still declining.

Simply put, will the headlines generated by the 10.2% unemployment rate and the angst it will create in the public’s mind convince Americans that they need to pull back on their spending because the economy – and job security – are worsening?

Cutting Holiday Spending

If that mentality takes hold, millions of Joe and Jill Six-Packs might put off individual purchases. And that would mean lesser levels of economic activity. For instance, will they decide not to open their wallets as much as they might otherwise this Christmas season because of the scary headlines? That could become a self-fulfilling prophecy that moves the economy back into recession rather than along the road to recovery.

And then, there is the matter of whether the folks in Washington will see the climbing jobless numbers – and predictions the rate will eventually hit 11% – as reason to take action that might not turn out to be the best thing for the economy in the long run.

Perhaps lawmakers might pass a new stimulus package of hundreds of billions of dollars despite the continuing risk that the already skyrocketing national debt will crowd out private investment and raise interest rates – another proven job-killer.

The U.S.’s 10.2% jobless rate is the highest since 1983. It doesn’t take into account people who have stopped looking for work or taken part-time jobs; if they were counted, the rate would jump to about 17.5%.

That’s a long haul from the 5% rate before the recession began. It represents millions of American families – otherwise known as voters – who are worrying about how they will make ends meet.

Not to minimize the suffering of those out of work, but the evidence is that things really are getting better for the economy overall. Last month, the government said the economy grew at a 3.5% rate in the July-September quarter.

Try Making That Argument

Since a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, last quarter’s expansion means that technically the recession has actually ended, though it certainly doesn’t feel that way, even to those who have jobs.

And any officeholder who tried to make the argument the recession is over would certainly find himself in hot water with many constituents, not to mention the news media. They would almost certainly paint him or her as out-of-touch with everyday Americans.

That happened to the last president to preside over a steep recession – Ronald Reagan, who like Barack Obama inherited a lousy economy. Mr. Reagan claimed the economy was turning, too, and he resisted pressure to fight a recession he believed was ebbing. Still, his opponents made double-digit unemployment a political anvil around his neck and his party suffered in the ensuing midterm elections.

But the cycle turned in time for Mr. Reagan, who had a booming economy in 1984 and won a landslide re-election.

Mr. Obama can’t be happy about the current jobless numbers, but his political health may depend on those figures not scaring the public and the pols into acting based on the assumption that the economy remains at its nadir.

History says he should believe the computer models.

Write to Peter Brown at peter.brown@quinnipiac.edu.

One month after the U.S. launched a great diplomatic experiment by talking directly with Iran, the pressure of the effort is opening up some stress fractures.

Some small fractures are showing up in the wall of solidarity the U.S. and its partners have tried to show in confronting Iran over its nuclear program — specifically over how long to give diplomacy a chance before turning to new economic sanctions.

But the more meaningful stress fractures are showing up within Iran itself. There, the unwillingness to follow through on a nuclear deal the country’s own negotiators worked out — or even to offer a straight explanation of why Iran isn’t following through — has laid bare serious fissures within the country’s ruling establishment.

If that continues to be the case, the U.S. and its partners will be heading in coming weeks toward a fundamental question: Are these splits within Iran more likely to be widened by the pressures generated through continued diplomacy, or by the pressures generated by tough new economic sanctions?

That’s the picture that emerges from conversations in recent days with both American and European officials familiar with the diplomatic engagement with Iran. None pretend to have perfect knowledge of what is happening within the Byzantine world of Iranian decision-making, which has been made all the more complicated by the divisions opened up amid protests over what is widely seen as a rigged presidential election there during the summer.

See the full column here.