Politics – 2011 Michigan Debate Institutes – gls lab

***NEG – Generic

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with GOP leaders to end a tax impasse that threatens to create the first U.S. financial default, the White House said. "I'm not making announcements about specific talks," spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Thursday after Republican negotiators pulled out of bipartisan budget talks tied to a deal to raise the government's $14.29 trillion debt limit. But "the process was always going to have to ... move forward with the engagement of the [House] speaker, Senate leaders, House minority leader, the president, etc.," Carney said. He did not say when Obama would get involved in the meetings, now led by Vice President Joe Biden, who said Thursday the talks are "in abeyance." Obama met privately with Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, at the White House Wednesday evening "to discuss a variety of issues, following up on conversations they had on the golf course on Saturday," Carney said.

Today’s New York trip was a less intimate affair: a $1,250- per-person fundraiser with gay and lesbian activists and a $35,800-per-plate dinner with Wall Street bankers. After dinner was a performance of the musical “Sister Act,” where he will be joined by the show’s producer, actress Whoopi Goldberg, and young Democratic donors. The dinner at Daniel, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, drew some of Obama’s biggest donors to the 2008 campaign, as well as some who initially backed his rival for the party’s nomination, then-Senator Hillary Clinton. “There’s a disquiet out there,” the president told the wealthy donors, because people “recognize that we haven’t yet broken through to the future that we want.” When the president mentioned withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, he got a round of applause from the crowd of about 70 donors. He reiterated his message that the 2012 political campaign is “about a set of contrasting visions” between the Republicans’ “cramped” vision that would cut entitlements and the Democrats’ “big generous vision” of America.

President Obama’s post-Osama bin Laden job approval bounce has largely dissipated for most issue areas, but it still persists in the realm of foreign policy (49-46 overall in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, compared to 50-44 on foreign policy). Obama will need that goodwill this week as he both announces troop withdrawal levels from Afghanistan and navigates the months-old conflict in Libya. In addition to the added goodwill of the bin Laden operation, Obama is also cushioned by the fact that on both Afghanistan and Libya, Republican opinion is divided.

House Republicans are demanding that President Barack Obama join the negotiations over the debt ceiling. The lead Republican at the negotiations, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, said today that the negotiations have stalled over difficult issues that can only be resolved by direct discussions between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. (Lawmakers officially roll out ‘Cut, Cap, Balance’ pledge) “It is time for the president to speak clearly,” Cantor said in a statement after walking out of budget negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden. On Tuesday, Cantor hinted at the breakdown, when he said that negotiations had reached a critical stage. “I put the onus on the president,” he said to reporters. “I have talked about the productive talks I have had with the vice president. But the president has not seemed willing to engage and say that he is willing to do the tough stuff with us.” Obama has kept himself far away from the debt ceiling negotiations, as part of a strategy intended to focus the public’s anger on Republican negotiators, say GOP legislators and allies.

After hearing a lot of anti-Obama sentiment from speakers at Netroots Nation I was planning to do a post noting how unrepresentative the NN crowd—mostly male, overwhelmingly white—is from the actual base of the Democratic Party which continues to like Barack Obama a lot. But according to Christina Bellantoni, the best survey we have actually shows that the Netroots Nation attendees mirror this generous assessment of the president: A straw poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that 80 percent either approve or strongly approve of the president more than a year before voters head to the polls to decide whether he deserves a second term. The results broke down to 27 percent strongly approving of Obama and 53 percent approving “somewhat.” Thirteen percent said they “somewhat disapprove,” and 7 percent strongly disapprove of the president. Nothing earth-shattering. But a reminder that the proximate problem faced by would-be left-wing critics of President Obama is that they generally have much less credibility with the progressive constituency than the president does himself.

Over at The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost makes the case that President Obama's support amongst Democrats is more like that of Michael Dukakis than Jimmy Carter. Using Gallup Poll data, Cost argues that Obama, unlike Carter, has maintained his support amongst Democrats by his third year in office. By contrast, Carter's support amongst Democrats had fallen by 20 points by 1979. Of course, Carter would have Ted Kennedy with whom to contend. Cost notes that the character of the Democratic Party has changed over the past three decades. Whereas in 1979, the "Northern/liberal faction" was still an insurgent force in the Democratic Party, today it is the Democratic mainstream. Thus Obama need not worry about a Ted Kennedy like figure lurking in the shadows. But Cost thinks Obama should worry about another Massachusetts liberal - Michael Dukakis.Cost then shows the data. In 1988, Dukakis got 46% of the popular vote, earning the support of 82% of Democrats and 42% of Independents. In the latest Gallup Poll, President Obama has the support of 46% of the electorate with 82% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans.