No Bump

Gallup reports:

Gallup Daily tracking finds no change in President Obama's job approval rating after his State of the Union address. The president's 50% average for the week ending Sunday, Jan. 30, matches the prior week's rating, which was the highest weekly average for Obama since May.

Those who watched or saw coverage of the president's State of the Union address on Jan. 25 generally gave it positive reviews. The speech does not, however, appear to have significantly affected Obama's job approval rating. Obama averaged 50% for the five days preceding his speech (Jan. 20-24) and 50% for the five days afterward (Jan. 26-30).

Social Media in 2010

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports:

After first gaining prominence as tools for political engagement during the 2008 presidential election, social media became a regular part of the political environment for voters in the 2010 midyear elections. Some 22% of online adults used Twitter or social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace in the months leading up to the November, 2010 elections to connect to the campaign or the election itself.

In contrast to the 2008 race—in which Democratic voters led the way in their use of online social networks for political purposes—Republican voters and supporters of the “Tea Party” movement caught up with Democrats in their use of social media in 2010.

“The social networking population as a whole has grown larger and demographically more diverse in recent years, and the same is true when it comes to political activity on social networking sites.” said Aaron Smith, Senior Researcher Specialist and author of the report. “These platforms are now utilized by politically active individuals of all ages and ideologies to get news, connect with others, and offer their thoughts on the issues that are important to them.”

Students for Daniels

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Gov. Mitch Daniels is about to hit the airwaves in Iowa, New Hampshire and his home state of Indiana, months before any other potential 2012 candidate.

Except the Republican governor isn’t behind the TV spots, and is still a long way from deciding if he even wants to join the GOP nomination brawl.

The ads are being paid for by a growing student-run Draft Daniels movement, based at Yale University and now with 36 other campuses. The group says it will run the spot during this Sunday’s NFL Pro Bowl on a Fox affiliate serving the greater Des Moines market. The group promises to run it later in Indiana and New Hampshire.

Iowa and New Hampshire will kick off the nomination race a little over a year from now.

The 30-second spot features an unnamed Yale political-science major recounting how happy she was when someone came along and bought her a car and subsidized her medical insurance.

“Everything was perfect. Until I got my credit card bill,” she says. “It turned he was spending all of my money!”

Health Care Debate

In The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jamie Dupree notes something that will be a GOP talking point right through the 2012 campaign:

Republicans in the Congress began their real effort to attack the Obama health reform law, using a pair of hearings to launch a variety of attacks, as the GOP was presented with a golden piece of information from one witness.

That piece of info came from the Chief Actuary of Medicare and Medicaid, Richard Foster, who told the House Budget Committee that two main claims of the Obama Administration about the health law probably won't come true.

Foster said the health law probably won't drive the cost of health care down as promised - and he also raised questions about the repeated claim of the White House that everyone will be able to keep their health insurance if they like it.

The answers were trumpeted throughout the day by Republicans, and are certain to be repeated for weeks and weeks to come as Republicans try to find a way to overturn this controversial law

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The Old Rules Might Not Apply

Michael Barone cautions that three "old rules" may not apply to the 2012 GOP nomination contest.

The first is the notion that Republican nomination always goes to the candidate next in line in seniority.

Yes, Republican primary voters and caucus goers are probably more inclined than Democrats to defer to seniority. But when you look back at the Republican nominating contests in the post-1968 era, and there are not many of them, you find that most of the nominations were close-run things.

...

The next-in-line candidates did win in 2000 and 2008. But George W. Bush only narrowly survived a rout in New Hampshire, and John McCain's strategy eight years later--wait for all the other candidates' strategies to fail--is one that usually guarantees defeat rather than victory.

As for 2012, the next-in-line candidate is said to be Mitt Romney, on the basis of a successful business career and a single term as governor of Massachusetts.

The next rule that needs to be debunked is that Republican candidates must pass a litmus test on cultural issues, especially abortion. This was true in 1988, 1996 and 2000, when religious conservatives were a newly energized political force and one stirred to action by Bill Clinton's misconduct.

But Sept. 11 changed a lot of things, including this old rule. A pro-choice stand on abortion didn't prevent Rudy Giuliani from leading Republican polls until November 2007, when his appointee as police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, was indicted. And going to all 99 counties swearing he was a right-to-lifer didn't save Mitt Romney in the majority-religious conservative Iowa caucuses in January 2008.

The financial crisis and protracted recession have once again changed the focus of Republican voters. Polls have showed that Tea Party activists, who number in the hundreds of thousands, tend to be cultural conservatives, but they moved into politics to oppose the stimulus package and Obamacare, not abortion and same-sex marriage.

The third rule that may not be applicable this time is that you have to start early to win. Tell that to Bill Clinton, who announced his candidacy in October 1991, just four months before the Iowa caucuses. Many potential and putative Republican candidates this time seem to be biding their time. You may be able to ramp up a campaign pretty quickly in the Facebook era.

Romney and the GOP Detente

In the 2008 cycle, candidates started early. As noted in a previous post, Mitt Romney formed his exploratory committee on January 3, 2007. Reid Wilson reports at National Journal:

As presidential candidates jockey for position ahead of next year’s nominating contests, Republicans in New Hampshire believe that the race will come down to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—and the rest. If Romney is to be defeated, both friends and foes say, someone will have to emerge as the anti-Romney consensus.

At least, that’s the conventional wisdom among the Granite State’s political class. But what has them scratching their heads is a more fundamental question: Where, exactly, has Romney gone?

He has not held a public event in New Hampshire since late October. His next scheduled stop is an address to the Carroll County Republican Committee’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner, on March 5. As other contenders hit the trail, Romney has left his best battleground undefended for four months.

..

Romney benefits, perhaps more so than his rivals, from the détente that’s preventing the 2012 campaign from kicking off in earnest. Until the campaign gets under way, he will not suffer the slings and arrows sure to head his way once it starts. As the perceived front-runner, Romney will become an easy foil for long shots, and for anyone determined to be the anti-Romney.

The seeming lack of urgency extends beyond Romney to the rest of the field. After the grueling pace that political professionals kept over the last three cycles, all of which produced tumultuous political climates, starting the next cycle so early holds little appeal. Jumping into a presidential race early, strategists for many contenders point out, means that a candidate has to start spending resources earlier.

“One of the lessons we learned from the last campaign is that things got started way too soon. Mitt is in no hurry to make an announcement,” [Romney spokesman Eric] Fehrnstrom said. Added the adviser who asked to remain anonymous: “There was a real fatigue in the campaign four years ago. It was a long slog.”

Winning the Future

Ben Smith writes at Politico:

Newt Gingrich's staff yesterday noted that the former speaker wrote a 2005 book whose title, "Winning the Future," the president used as the theme of his speech.

And this wasn't a totally obscure publication. A publishing industry source adds that Gingrich's book, from Regnery, sold quite well: 70,000 hardcover copies and 40,000 paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan, which captures most bookstore sales but doesn't count bulk sales directly from the publisher.

By comparison, Eric Cantor's "Young Guns" has sold, according to BookScan, 10,000 copies, while Dick Armey's "Give Us Liberty" has sold about 20,000.