Looks like Dubya and Jeb! got together for a “town hall” at some high school in Naples, Florida. The Bushes didn’t allow cameras, but a reporter caught Dubya trashing the Quitter.

The brothers differed in opinion on subjects such as Sarah Palin. Although, both tried to stay neutral, George W. said vice presidents don’t win elections.

Now I can’t tell if this is sloppy reporting or if Dubya meant to say “vice presidential candidates.” But it certainly doesn’t sound like a compliment.

Then there’s this.

Most notably the Bush brothers disagreed on the Senate race between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist. Jeb Bush says he is officially neutral, but is disappointed in Crist’s embrace of the stimulus bill. George W. Bush joked “who the hell is Marco Rubio”, something that even caught the attention of this high schooler.

Ouch. In case you didn’t know, Marco Rubio is the teabaggers’ golden boy in Florida.

Also: way to keep it classy in front of the sophomores, Chimpy.

A new PPP poll is making the rounds today. The poll reports that half of Americans (50%) are opposed health care reform, and only 39% state support. What is interesting is the source of much of the opposition:

Digging a little deeper on those numbers though 64% of respondents planning or open to voting Democratic this fall support it with only 22% opposed. The overall numbers are negative only because of 94/1 opposition among folks who have said there is no way they’ll vote Democratic this fall.

Roughly a third of Americans plan to almost always vote for Democrats, and a third plan to almost always vote for Republicans. Given how the Republican Congressional leadership has decided to wage an all-out war on Democrats’ health care bill, it is not surprising that the Republican base is nearly unanimously against it.

The incredibly strong opposition to health care reform in the Republican base makes bipartisan reform next to impossible. I doubt any Republican in Congress would ever want to go completely against their entire base to help Democrats achieve a big victory. Combined with the fact the obstructionism has turned into such a successful political strategy, there seems to be zero incentive for Republicans to help Democrats pass health care reform. A successful bipartisan health care bill would probably hurt Republican chances of taking back Congress. It just won’t happen.

With the Republican base firmly opposed to reform, the idea that adding any number of “Republican solutions” to health care reform could increase support with core Republican voters is a foolishness. You have a chicken-and-egg problem. The Republican base might be made slightly more open to reform if there were huge buy-in from Congressional Republicans, but a large number of Congressional Republicans would never buy in to a big, unpopular bill opposed overwhelmingly by their base.

The only real chance for Democrats to improve the standing of health care reform is to increase support with their base, and swing voters who would at least consider voting for Democrats. Provisions like a public option and Medicare buy-in appeal strongly to this group. Clearly, months of trying to move the bill to the right has only eaten away support from the left, and done nothing to improve health care reform’s standing with the Republican base.

Barack Obama just spoke and offered a strong defense of the Recovery Act, which he signed into law one year ago today. This complements a wide-ranging set of efforts from Administration officials to both show the importance of the stimulus in moving the economy from failure toward recovery, and to put Republicans in a box, calling them out for hypocrisy on voting against projects they tout in their districts.

The graphic at right can be seen pretty much everywhere today, showing the gradual decline in job loss since the enactment of the Recovery Act. In the three months before enactment, 2.2 million jobs were lost, and the economy has not been handed over to a new President in such a shambles since the Hoover/Roosevelt trade in 1933. Since then, Administration officials say, job growth has converted from a 6 percent loss to a 6 percent gain, with much of that turnaround attributable to the Recovery Act. And job loss has slowed dramatically, with net job gains expected in the spring. This annual report prepared by the Vice President’s office provides much of the rhetorical bulwark for this defense, and you can see the bullet point version of this on an Organizing for America page blasted to supporters. But David Leonhardt’s analytical case for the stimulus in the New York Times today has the benefit of being from a source without a vested interest:

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.

In addition to this defense, Democrats from the Administration on down are trying to pin some hypocritical behavior on Republicans, faulting them for voting against the Recovery Act, continuing to term it a failure, and then showing up in their own districts touting the funding for various projects. President Obama made special mention of that in his remarks today, saying that Republicans continue to argue against the stimulus “even as many of them show up for ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects in their districts.”