Friday Open Thread [1.23.15]

A new GBA Strategies poll finds that Republican voters are divided over the idea of increasing taxes on wealthy U.S. taxpayers.

“When asked whether they support raising the tax rate on personal income above $1 million annually, 36% of Republicans supported the plan and 47% of Republicans were opposed. The rest were undecided.”

“But when asked whether they supported raising the personal income tax on those earning $1 million a year to 50%, ‘the same rate taxed under President Reagan,’ Republicans shifted their support, with 53% supporting and 33% opposing.”

A new Public Policy Polling survey in Pennsylvania finds that the Senate race there in 2016 will be a competitive one that the Dems can recapture. Right now, Sen. Pat Toomey (R) leads 2010 candidate Joe Sestak (D) 40% to 36%. Toomey trails Ed Rendell 44-41.

The Asbury Park Press reports that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie “has refused to release almost $800,000 in American Express card bills being sought by New Jersey Watchdog which has written that the governor’s travel is costing taxpayers a lot of money.” Yeah, that is not going to fly if you want to run for President, fat ass.

Quinnipiac: “One year after the Bridgegate scandal erupted, New Jersey Gov. Christ Christie still can’t get his job approval rating over the 50% mark as 46% of New Jersey voters approve of the job he’s doing, while 48% disapprove, his worst overall score in almost four years.”

Tomasky doubts that the GOP will be able to come up with an agenda. All they have right now is repeal the ACA, cut taxes and build Keystone. Oh, and go to war everywhere.

[Y]ou can’t get people to think about longer-term economic goals when they’re out of a job, or underemployed. But once that’s turned, you can. That is what’s turning now—not turned, but turning. And that is what is about to make our political conversation be about this new one thing: sharing the prosperity. The speech was not a great speech, a speech for the ages; but it did understand that, and it did tap into that. People are now willing to start thinking about longer-term economic goals. A quickie CNN poll found that the speech was extremely well-received: 51 percent very positive, 30 percent somewhat positive, only 18 percent negative.

That really should worry Republicans, no matter how many seats they have in Congress. Our politics is becoming about one big thing on which the Republicans have nothing to say. Actually, they do have something to say, and it’s “No!”

Ed Kilgore:

In conservative-land, you see, Obama’s first election was a fluke and his second a calamitous accident, both canceled by the ensuring midterms and both destined to be remembered as incidental interruptions of the Long March of Movement Conservatism towards total power. The idea that 2008 and 2012 are just as significant as 2010 and 2014 (maybe a bit more significant insofar as far more Americans participated) is outrageous to the Right, and so Obama mentioning them was the defiant act of a political nonentity.

Beyond that, the basic framing of Obama’s remarks on the economy left Republicans even deeper in the trap they’ve been in ever since conditions began improving. The main criticism available to them for the performance of the economy is the one Democrats (and Obama himself) have been articulated: sluggish wage growth and growing inequality. But Republicans have little or no agenda to deal with that beyond the usual engorge-the-job-creators stuff dressed up with attacks on the few corporate welfare accounts they’ve agreed to oppose, and then the Keystone XL Pipeline. On this last point, Obama was very clever in dismissing Keystone as one controversial infrastructure project we’re spending too much time fighting over as hundreds of others languish. It made Joni Ernst’s plodding Official Response sound all the more foolish for spending so much time on that one project.

Ezra Klein says that if Mitt Romney was President right now, and we had all of this good economic news, the applause would never have ended on Tuesday night, and Brian Beutler says Republicans would have “draped him in Reagan’s cloak, and the public would have warmed once again to the kinds of policies that George W. Bush’s presidency briefly discredited.”