Why Obama is rising in the polls — and Republicans aren't

President Obama just got a boost as he heads into a showdown with Republicans over reducing the deficit to avoid $1.2 trillion in 10-year budget cuts due to begin hitting March 1. Bloomberg released a poll late Wednesday that gave Obama his highest job-approval rating in three years, with 55 percent of those surveyed giving him a thumbs up. At the same time, the poll put the popularity of Republicans at its lowest point since Bloomberg began measuring in September 2009, with just 35 percent saying they view the GOP favorably. The GOP's brand has slipped six percentage points in the last six months alone.

Predictably, the news triggered a wave of gloating from Obama's supporters. "Americans just aren't buying what Republicans are selling," says Steve Benen at MSNBC. And Bloomberg's poll results aren't even the worst new numbers showing just how bad the GOP's predicament is. "That prize goes to a new USA Today/Pew Research Center poll," Benen says, in which nearly half of Americans blame the GOP for the looming budget fiasco — known as the sequester — while only a hair more than 30 percent blame Democrats.

Republicans can call this the "Obamaquester" all they want, suggests Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice, but the public sees through it. Yes, Obama originally backed the idea as a way to wriggle out of the debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) "was a cheerleader... for it two years ago," too. And today, "more Americans will blame it on the Republican Party than on Obama, no matter what Fox News, Sean Hannity or conservative bloggers say." Why? Obama says spending on infrastructure, education, and alternative energy will create more jobs than the GOP obsession with slashing taxes and spending — and the president's approach is closer to what most Americans want. "GOPers continue playing to their choir," Gandelman says, "while Obama is successfully addressing a larger pool of Americans and is (for now) changing some minds."

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"President Obama has staked out positions that seem to be closer to the public's thinking than the positions Republicans have staked out," Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, tells USA Today. "The challenge for him is in building the public's sense of immediacy on some of these issues, particularly on climate change and guns." If he can't do that, he'll have trouble capitalizing on the upper hand he now enjoys over GOP leaders, and getting key elements of his agenda passed.

Of course, Obama still faces some headwinds. "Americans do narrowly disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy," says Kevin Robillard at Politico, "and have an overwhelmingly negative opinion about his handling of the federal deficit — only 35 percent approve, and 55 percent disapprove."