You are right, Sam. I live in OH, just 1 poll showed

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AM I crazy, or wasn�t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had �all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,� declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. �Obama Losing Stimulus Message War� was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn�t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was �a steaming pile of garbage.�

Less than a month into Obama�s term, we don�t (and can�t) know how he�ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner�s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson�s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.
�It�s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,� he said. �We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of �07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.� But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, �everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.�

The stimulus battle was more of the same. �This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,� he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn�t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: �If you watched cable TV, you�d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.�

For Axelrod, the moral is �not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.�

Here�s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the �inevitable� Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn�t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week�s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign�s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who�d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys � incessantly interviewed in bars and diners � would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the �dead-ender� Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama �losing control,� also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to �generational theft.� F.D.R.�s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus�s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington�s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can�t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president�s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) � not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that �perhaps we�ve overanalyzed it, we don�t know what we�re talking about.� But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating �victory.� Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus�s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that �the House Republicans� zero votes for the Obama presidency�s stimulus �package� is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.�s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.� There hasn�t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party�s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele�s argument against the stimulus package is that �in the history of mankind� no �federal, state or local� government has ever �created one job.� As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those �zombie banks� that we�re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that�s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That�s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there�s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington�s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn�t turned around, he told the crowd, then �you�ll have a new president.� The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama�s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn�t happen either.

who waited outside for 5-6 hours in freezing temps just to save maybe $50. Lord have mercy. I guess I'm thankful I don't need or want anything enough to do that!!

You're right about the me-me-me and it makes me sick. People will kill each other for a dollar!!

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans' job approval rating of Congress is up an additional 8 points this month, after a 12-point increase last month, and now stands at 39% -- the most positive assessment of Congress since February 2005.

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Americans who identify themselves as Democrats are mostly responsible for the improved ratings of Congress measured in the March 5-8 Gallup Poll. After showing a 25-point increase in their approval of Congress from January to February and a further 14-point increase in March, a majority of Democrats (57%) now approve of the job the Democratically-controlled Congress is doing. Independents also show improved ratings of Congress, but not nearly to the extent that Democrats do. Republicans' evaluations of Congress have changed very little this year.

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Quick Turnaround

Even though Congress' job approval rating is still low on an absolute basis, the recent ratings represent a quick turnaround from the historically low ratings of 2008. Last year, on average, only 19% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing -- one of the three lowest yearly congressional approval averages in Gallup records dating back to 1974, along with 1979 (19%) and 1992 (18%).

In January of this year, Congress' job approval rating among remained low at 19%, before jumping to 31% in February after the change in presidential administrations from Republican George W. Bush to Democrat Barack Obama. But this month brings an even more positive evaluation of Congress, with 39% of Americans now approving.

The latest increase suggests the reason for the improved ratings of Congress in 2009 may go beyond simply the change from split control to one-party control of the federal government, to include an assessment of the work Congress has been doing with the new president on the economy and other issues.

Such an explanation seems plausible given that a majority of Democrats now approve of the job Congress is doing, and that the gap between Democratic and Republican approval of Congress is growing, as Congress passes and President Obama signs laws to deal with the economy and other issues that largely follow a Democratic philosophy of governing.

Even though the Democratic Party had majority control of both houses of Congress in 2007-2008, it was able to achieve little of its legislative agenda while Republican Bush remained in the White House. This lack of results may have soured Democrats' opinions of Congress. During this time, rank-and-file Democrats' approval ratings of Congress sank to as low as 11% in July 2008, after starting out near 40% shortly after the party took control of Congress in early 2007.

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Now that the strengthened Democratic-controlled Congress is able to pass most of what it wants with little or no help from Republicans, and can count on the president to sign it into law, rank-and-file Democrats hold Congress in much greater esteem. The 57% approval rating for Congress among Democrats is the best the party has given the institution since March 2002, when Congress' job approval scores were at historical highs in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,012 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted March 5-8, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is �3 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

This not only applies to the discussion below but also any wrong behavior such as stealing, murder, rape, or any one of the other blights on the face of mankind. Please explain your answer citing whatever source of information supports your argument.

Asked whether former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 52 percent said he was not, but 43 percent said they believe he was. The White House has denied Hussein's 9/11 involvement -- most recently in a news conference August 21, when President Bush said Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks.

Who will get the Democratic nomination, and who will that person pick for a running mate?

Who will get the Republican nomination, and who will that person pick as a running mate?

Winner gets a 22K gold-plated crystal ball, and the top position on Wall Street..!!!l