This week, Kristen chats with Alex Lundry from Target Point and Kevin Madden from Dyke & Associates about the “Golf or Gulf” website, constituents breaking away from Democrats, Scott Brown’s backing of the financial reform bill, the word “liberal,” and the Apple fans.

Of course, Obama isn’t on the ballot this November. But his ratings contribute to what Winston calls the public’s “overall sense of the ability to govern.” From that perspective, Obama’s troubles are the Democrats’ troubles.

To read more about the poll numbers and Republican response to them, read the full article at washingtonexaminer.com

“I’m sure he would like us to spend all our time on health care, but we’re not going to do that,” said Winston, a longtime adviser to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
“The No. 1 issue in the country is jobs and the economy, and I’m sure he’d love Republicans to take their eye off that,” Winston said.

Read the full story at desmoinesregister.com

But David Winston, a political consultant who advises Congressional Republican leaders, said the unemployment rate was the most important indicator for voters assessing Mr. Obama’s performance.

“If this number doesn’t significantly improve, that’s going to be a negative for him and for his party,” Mr. Winston said.

Access the full article here: nytimes.com

If Obama’s numbers continue to slide, his policy agenda is at serious risk. Don’t think for one moment that members of the House and Senate don’t pay attention to these national polls. They do, especially those who find themselves in competitive races. Equally important, their own internal state or district polls will likely also have a presidential job approval question. Whether Obama is under 50% or under water back home could and, in many cases, will impact their voting behavior in D.C.

To read all of David’s article, turn to pollster.com

The Right Idea Episode 29 – The Olympics from The Winston Group on Vimeo.

Comments from left and right – mostly from the right – flew after Obama’s trip to Copenhagen failed to secure a win for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics. Kristen chats with Abby Alger and The Winston Group’s Chris Anderson about what folks from the right said, what happened in Copenhagen, and possible reasons why Chicago lost the vote.

The Right Idea Episode 25 – Campaigning vs. Governing from The Winston Group on Vimeo.

What’s happened since Obama stepped off the campaign trail and sat down in the Oval Office? Kristen talks to J.P. Freire from the Washington Examiner and Chris Beam of Slate magazine about what’s happened so far since the “honeymoon” ended and what to look forward to in 2012.

Anti-Obama passions are undeniably present, although they may not be as meaningful as advertised. In part, they reflect the high-decibel partisanship of a political dialogue defined by cable television and angry Web sites. As Republican pollster David Winston puts it, “I think there are things going on that have nothing to do with Obama, like the change in the political discourse.”

Access the entire article on Politics Daily

David Winston, a Republican pollster, agrees. He says that Obama “has to do a kind of reset on health care and figure out if he can regain the initiative on the policy debate, since he clearly lost the month of August.” Winston cautions, however, that Obama has bigger problems than his message. “One of the difficult stress points of a majority coalition is how you keep your base and the people beyond the base together to sustain that coalition. Health care is the first clear example where the two have divergent views.”

If Republicans are heartened by Obama’s summer stumble, that doesn’t mean they should relax. Republicans, says Winston, should work to create a “positive policy choice”…

To read the full article, access nationalreview.com

“This is his big moment in managing a majority coalition,” said David Winston, a GOP strategist who compared Obama’s challenge to those faced — unsuccessfully — by three other former leaders: Clinton on healthcare, President George W. Bush on Social Security, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the budget battle that shut down part of the government during Clinton’s first term.

“Every one of them overreached,” said Winston. “But the question is, do they understand they have overreached? And what do they do in response?”

Access the LA Times article here

The Right Idea, Episode 19: Tech & the Obama Administration from The Winston Group on Vimeo.

This week, Kristen Soltis talks to Patrick Ruffi from Engage and Liz Mair from Hynes Communications to address the current administration’s use of technology in terms of messaging, transparency, and other recent efforts.

“It hurts everybody,” said David Winston, an advisor to the House and Senate Republican leadership. “It makes the political process less connected to people’s lives and therefore makes it harder to get at the problems they face. . . . This is a discussion of about where our country goes. Not who can call somebody the worst name.”

To read more, access LA Times online

The first episode of The Winston Group’s new podcast is up! “The Right Idea” is a video podcast that comes out twice a week featuring discussion of both current events and long-term strategy with some of Washington’s brightest young minds in politics and policy.

This week, Kristen Soltis talks to Matt Moon from The Tax Foundation and Nicole Kurokawa from the Cato Institute, about Obama’s budget proposals.

For the past six weeks, Democrats and Republicans have been engaged in the biggest, riskiest, most costly game of political speed chess in the nation’s history.
A chess game starts with the “opening,” a series of moves that define the basic structure and direction the game is likely to take.

Sometimes chess players will begin with an unexpected opening to throw the opponent off. Then they execute a series of moves that takes the game back to a more familiar opening. That’s called transposition.

By presenting an unexpected opening before returning to the familiar, the player hopes his opponent’s moves will be less sharp.

This has clearly been Team Obama’s opening.

During the campaign, Barack Obama talked about creating a different kind of Washington, reducing partisanship, welcoming ideas “wherever they came from,” getting rid of earmarks, banning lobbyists from his administration and ensuring transparency.

During the transition, Obama made moves toward the political center with some moderate Cabinet appointments and statements.

Once in office, however, what looked like real change quickly transposed into the traditional Democratic liberal opening.

Obama handed over responsibility for writing the stimulus package to Hill Democrats, tolerated the exclusion of Republicans from the process, nominated lobbyists for key positions and looked the other way when his promised waiting period for signing legislation went by the boards — and that was just the first two weeks after the inauguration.

This was followed by his “new era of responsibility budget” that saddles the country with massive debt for generations and his decision to abdicate any responsibility for the omnibus budget bill and its 8,500 earmarks. Today, Obama’s transposition is virtually complete.

The Washington battle is back to the old traditional Republican versus Democrat debate, only with much bigger stakes and played at warp speed by Washington standards.

Democrats are once again pushing huge tax and spending increases as Republicans argue just the opposite.

Because they’ve been in this position before and lost, Democrats understand that to win in this center-right country, they must paint this as the direst economic crisis since the Great Depression by scaring people into overcoming their natural skepticism of policies of the far left.

To persuade centrist voters to embrace a leftist agenda, Democrats also have to successfully define the origins of the crisis to their benefit by blaming greedy bankers, the rich and Republicans for not regulating financial institutions.

Republicans counter that it was the Democrats’ social engineering policies at the root of the economic meltdown, pressuring banks to make risky loans and blocking reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” one party slogan asserted, “He who controls the past, controls the future.” Apt words for Democratic attempts to revise history to push their current agenda.

Ironically, when Obama and Hill Democrats sat down at the table in January, they were in a position to define the game, another chess concept called “initiative.” Whoever moves first has it and game play determines whether it can be sustained or wrested away by the opponent.

But the president has frittered away his initiative. As the markets tank, 401(k)’s disappear and public confidence begins to erode, Obama seems to have forgotten that the country wants seriousness and steadiness from its leaders in times of crisis, not gimmicky summits and photo ops.

By using the crisis to push a left-wing laundry list, he has begun to lose focus on his most serious challenge — the economy.

A radical new cap-and-trade energy policy that will raise the cost of energy on every American, a controversial housing policy and a cut in home mortgage deductions that will cause home values to decline even further are just a few of his proposals for change that have become negative distractions.

And he apparently does have time to worry about Rush Limbaugh. As the Democratic attack on Limbaugh showed, Obama and company clearly don’t know what to do about Wall Street, so they retreated to the kind of partisan politics candidate Obama promised to reject.

Republicans have not yet wrested the initiative away from Obama and Hill Democrats, but they have made progress as seen in survey results.

Support for Obama’s policies now trail his personal support, but if he keeps playing the game for speed and tactical gains, history shows his numbers are likely to shift, possibly quickly. Already, several national surveys put his job approval at less than 60 percent.

Obama needs to rethink his position. He might listen to what film director Stanley Kubrick had to say about the game: “What chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

Roll Call