Obama's Early Days

Despite a few very minor missteps, it is abundantly clear that Obama is doing quite well in his early days in office, culminating in the passage of his stimulus bill. The small 'c' conservative Republican leaning media in Washington has been trying to see his administration as getting into trouble but the public isn't buying it. Take a look at this article in Politico, a Washington newspaper/web site that, because it is steeped in the capital's culture, has a Republican lean to it. In particular, I was struck by the following quotes from the piece, the first of which I saw on Political Wire:

“It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me,” said Ann Seltzer, the authoritative Iowa pollster who works throughout the Midwest....

“I don’t think he’s lost anything in terms of overall job approval or favorability,” said Andy Smith, a pollster at the University of New Hampshire. “That’s just the a perception inside the Beltway that everybody outside Washington pays attention to politics and eats and lives politics the way you guys do down there.”

More support for the Seltzer-Smith view can be gleaned from the details in the polling data contained in this post by Kos on Daily Kos.

Update on Sunday: today's column in the NY Times by Frank Rich reflects the theme of TC's post. Ditto this TPM item today: the Big Disconnect.