President Obama got no lasting bounce in the polls from passing his health care program, but the White House is pushing ahead anyway with a policy drive aimed at capitalizing on his perceived momentum.
After a brief, momentary lift of a few percentage points in the days after clearing health care through Congress, Obama is back at a 48 percent approval rating in Gallup’s presidential tracking polls, and 47 percent in Rasmussen Reports’.
“It does look pretty flat,” said Cal Jillson, a Southern Methodist University political scientist who said he expected Obama would improve about 5 percentage points if reform passed.
With one big win in hand, the White House is scrambling the president in several directions at once. A surprise weekend trip to Afghanistan roughly coincided with a new arms deal with Russia, to be followed by out of town trips this week promoting health care and the economy.
“It looks to me as if the administration has a series of positive developments they are trying to build on with health care and the arms treaty, an attempt to boost the atmospherics,” Jillson said.
In public appearances in the last week since reform passed and especially during his brief stop in Afghanistan, Obama has been showcasing a new, steely resolve and a public stoicism that is a shift from his usual, professorial airs.
“I think he was counted out a lot of times,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “I think he was enormously persistent.”
The new arms treaty with Russia, a significant foreign policy accomplishment for Obama, calls for a 30 percent reduction in long-range nuclear weapons maintained by both countries.
The president next month travels to Prague to sign the deal with his Russian counterpart, President Dmitry Medvedev, in which is likely to be a much-hyped event by the White House.
The treaty signing will come just one year after Obama delivered a speech in the same city outlining his vision for eradicating all nuclear weapons. The timing and the symbolism underscore the administration’s increasing facility for presidential stagecraft.
On the domestic front, Obama also faces a continued challenge over health care, which Republicans have promised to campaign against in the fall.
Despite the bill’s passage into law, the president is still promoting it to Americans as a good deal, and on Thursday he travels to Portland, Maine, to push that message.
The economy also is a persistent headache for the administration, and Obama on Friday travels to North Carolina to talk about it, on the same day new jobs figures will be released by the government.
Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, said he also expected more of a bounce from health care reform’s passage, but that Obama still won “a unique victory” with health care reform.
“He was a guy people were starting to not take seriously, and now they are taking him very seriously,” Hess said.
