Even Republican Voters Concerned about Income Inequality

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67% of Americans are godless commies who hate capitalism and freedom. That is, if you use the metrics offered by rightwing media. If you tend to be more in line with mainstream thought, then the better take is that Americans are concerned about equality and fairness -- just as we always have been. And the bad news for Republicans is that all those capitalism-hatin' Marxists include a majority of their own voters.

In all, 54% of Republican voters told Gallup that they were either very or somewhat dissatisfied with "the way income and wealth is distributed in the US." While this is way lower than the 67% of all Americans who answered likewise, there's still a majority of Republican voters echoing these Occupy movement sentiments. And if you remove Republicans from the equation to keep them from dragging down the curve, roughly three-quarters of respondents would agree that income inequality is not good for America.

Gallup analysis shows an opportunity for leadership by the president:

Obama will almost certainly touch on inequality in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28. This will certainly resonate in a general sense with the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with income and wealth distribution in the U.S. today. Members of the president's party agree most strongly with the president that this is an issue, but majorities of Republicans and independents are at least somewhat dissatisfied as well.

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The Brief Life of Bipartisanship and the Return of the Wingnuts

Hey, remember how the modest two year budget deal hammered out by Paul Ryan and Patty Murray was a sign that insane partisanship was on its way out? Yeah, you can stop shoveling dirt in gridlock's grave, because Republican hostage-taking isn't all that very dead yet.

Wall Street Journal: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) signaled that Republicans would not raise the debt ceiling next year without some sort of concessions from Democrats, saying lawmakers were still crafting their strategy.

“We, as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit,” Mr. Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. “We don’t want ‘nothing’ out of the debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we can accomplish out of this debt limit fight.”

The U.S. government spends more money than it brings in through taxes, which means the Treasury Department has to borrow money by issuing debt. The government can only borrow money up to a certain level - called the debt ceiling – which is set by Congress. In October, lawmakers agreed to “suspend” the debt limit until Feb. 7, 2014. The White House has said it will no longer negotiate with Republicans on conditions for raising the debt limit, but many Republicans have said they will only vote to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for budget changes like spending cuts.

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The GOP's Obamacare Problem

It's being called the relaunch of Healthcare.gov. But the fact that 100,000 people signed up in October -- while the headlines were filled with stories about how the website wasn't working -- suggests that "relaunch" might not be the most accurate description. However, one aspect that's never actually gotten off the ground before was the effort to get Americans to sign up in large numbers. Since the website was hampered by capacity problems, an awareness campaign would've been counterproductive. In fact, until recently, the administration was discouraging organizations from running recruitment campaigns of their own.

That's about to change.

Politico: President Barack Obama will launch a coordinated campaign Tuesday by the White House, congressional Democrats and their outside allies to return attention to why the Affordable Care Act passed in the first place.

After two months of intense coverage of the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, the president will host a White House event kicking off a three-week drive to refocus the public on the law’s benefits, senior administration officials told POLITICO.

The White House will take the lead in emphasizing a different benefit each day until the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for Jan. 1 coverage. The daily message will be amplified through press events and social media by Democratic members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, congressional campaign committees and advocacy organizations, officials said.

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2014 and the Virginian Microcosm

The President is facing record low approvals -- which makes him the most popular man in Washington. Observe:

NBC News' First Read: How low can President Obama and Congress go? We’re watching both continue to sink in polls. A Quinnipiac survey released yesterday found that Obama’s approval rating had dropped to 39%, which is his lowest point in that poll (we’re in Bush territory, folks). More ominously, just 44% said the president was honest and trustworthy -- yet another all-time low -- compared with 52% who disagreed.  Meanwhile, Gallup showed that Congress’ job-approval rating had declined to a mere 9%, which is the lowest mark in the poll’s 39-year history of asking that question. This race to the bottom isn’t new, of course. Our NBC/WSJ poll released late last month -- after the government shutdown, after the standoff over the debt limit, and after a month’s worth of reported problems with the federal health-care website -- also found Obama (42% approval) and the Republican Party (22%-53% fav/unfav) reaching all-time lows. But what these new polls show is that the slides don’t appear to be stopping.

So free falling Republican of free falling Obama? I think most thinking people would rather be in the President's position right now.  There's usually a second term slump, when the president becomes emblematic of the status quo -- and this is probably one of the more extreme examples of that -- but congress doesn't have that excuse. First Read speculates on what this means for the midterms and largely ends with a shrug, but there's a really good small scale experiment out there that's just concluded and is nearly a perfect representation of what many 2014 voters will face; i.e., given a choice between two candidates who suck and who voters hate, which would they choose?

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