BIT OF A BOUNCE - AT 9:34 A.M. ET:  Polls taken in whole or in part after the president's speech are trickling in, and they show a slight bounce, maybe, for Mr. Obama.  Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-nine percent (39%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -5. That’s the highest level of Strong Approval and the best Approval Index rating for the President in a month (see trends).

Data for this daily update is collected via nightly telephone surveys and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. As a result, nearly two-thirds of interviews for today's update were completed before the President’s speech to Congress Wednesday night. Sunday morning’s update will be the first based entirely upon interviews conducted following the speech. The President has typically enjoyed a bounce in the polls following his national prime time television appearances.

And...

The President’s speech also provided a modest bounce in support for his health care plans. Polling conducted over the past two nights shows that 46% of voters now support the reform proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats. Opposition is down to 51%. However, it’s a partisan bounce as the increase in support comes entirely from within the President’s own party.

COMMENT:  Washington hands are now talking about having a completed health-care "reform" bill by Thanksgiving.  That's more than two months from now.  Mr. Obama's speech will be a vague memory by then, and any bounce will depend on how well he does between today and Turkey time, not on the speech.

September 11, 2009   Permalink

QUOTE OF THE DAY, THUS FAR - AT 8:51 A.M. ET:   If I had to name the top five commentators in this country since the 9-11 attacks, I would certainly include Fouad Ajami, who has constantly reminded us of the true nature of those we are opposing, and of our own need to oppose them, and oppose them intelligently.  Here, in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami reflects on 9-11 and its legacy:

Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the "electronic herd." We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven't been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.

COMMENT:  Every journalist in America should have that quote posted above his or her desk - especially the part about our not being kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin. 

One of the great myths about 9-11 is that we were flooded with sympathy after the attacks, sympathy that George Bush then trashed.  Wrong.  Whatever sympathy there was lasted a day or two.  Some 48 hours after the attacks, the BBC went on the air with vicious anti-American programming. 

I believe that the anti-Americanism that followed 9-11 stemmed not from George Bush and his policies, but from the fact that we were successfully attacked.  The world loves a winner and despises a loser.  If you're successfully attacked, you get ten minutes of sympathy and ten years of contempt.  Look at our attitude toward the French and how it was formed by their failure to defend themselves successfully against the Nazis in 1940.

We know what keeps us safe.  But a president who chokes on the word "victory" can't tell us.

September 11, 2009