WASH. POST MORNING FIX
Whether or not a majority of Americans — or Members of Congress — believe that President Obama’s victory amounted to a mandate, it’s clear that the incumbent’s hand has been significantly strengthened by what happened on Nov. 6.
In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, President Obama is at 54 percent approval — the highest he has been in almost two years. (Obama was briefly at 56 percent approval in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden.) And Obama’s approval rating when it comes to handling the economy is at 50 percent for the first time since June 2010. As importantly, Obama’s victory has strongly consolidated Democrats behind him while the defeat of Mitt Romney has left Republicans without any obvious foil, leaving the job of countering Obama to the decidedly unpopular congressional wing of the party.
In the Post-ABC poll, 90 percent of Democrats approve of the job Obama is doing while just 45 percent of Republicans feel the same way about GOPers in Congress. (Somewhat amazingly, a majority — 51 percent — of self-identified Republicans disapprove of the job their congressional leaders are doing.).
Those numbers bear out just how hard House Speaker John Boehner’s job actually is. Not only does he have to try to combat a president who has clearly benefited in the eyes of the public from winning the election, but he also must cope with the fact that there are a large number of Republicans who simply don’t like what he (or any GOP members of Congress) are doing.
We continue to believe that this political dynamic makes a deal on the fiscal cliff likely, due to the fact that to not make a deal would throw Republicans into a PR fight that they have no reasonable hope of winning. Of course, we have also heard it argued that a deal seen as an abandonment of conservative principles could cost the party a portion of its base and would, therefore, not be worth doing.
Rock, meet hard place. Winning a presidential election has its benefits for a party — most notably that you have a recently-validated leader of your side even as your opponents are scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it without any clear sense of who’s in charge.
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Boehner’s plan to hold a vote on allowing the Bush tax cuts for income over $1 million to expire and renewing the rest was quickly dismissed by Democrats and also some Republicans....It may seem like a more conservative-friendly alternative to Obama’s offer, which has moved the threshold on allowing tax cuts to expire from $250,000 to now $400,000. But to a lot of Republicans, it would still be voting for an increase in tax rates, which just about all of them have sworn not to do.
Fixbits:
Obama on Wednesday will name Vice President Biden as head of the administration’s working group on gun violence. President Obama said he would submit broad new proposals no later than January and would commit his office to overcoming political opposition in the wake of last week’s killings.
A family acquaintance said Tuesday that Lanza had been estranged from his father and brother for the past two years, despite his father's repeated efforts to repair the relationship.Adam Lanza began refusing to see his father and his brother, 24-year-old Ryan Lanza, at about the same time that his father began seeing another woman in the year after the Lanzas' divorce became final in 2009, he said. Peter Lanza eventually married the woman.
The hard drive to Adam Lanza's computer was completely destroyed by him, and made irretreivable, before he went on his rampage.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) says school districts should have the right to arm their teachers.
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U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday after a brief two-session rally. Stocks began retreating after negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner hit another impasse. Obama called GOP actions “puzzling” adding that Republicans find it “very hard” to say yes to him, while a spokesman for Boehner described the White House as “irrational.”