WashPost
Sunday, January 31, 2010
When President Obama urged lawmakers during his State of the Union speech to work with him on "restoring the public trust," he was hardly going out on a limb. The Congress he was addressing is one of the least popular in decades. Barely a quarter of Americans approve of the job it's doing, according to the latest Gallup/USA Today poll, while 58 percent said it was below average or one of the worst ever, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey last month.
It's not hard to find reasons why Americans are down on Capitol Hill, and why President Obama's approval rating has dropped below 50 percent in many polls. A year into the 111th Congress, unemployment remains at 10 percent, and many Americans are struggling to get by -- even as they've watched Congress bail out banks and coddle the same bankers now salivating over massive new bonuses. At the same time, the public has had a front-row seat to the always messy legislative process on health care and other issues, and this past year that process has been messier, more rancorous and more partisan than at any point in modern memory.
There seems to be little to endear citizens to their legislature or to the president trying to influence it. It's too bad, because even with the wrench thrown in by Republican Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts, this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president -- and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.
The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it -- $288 billion -- came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments.
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