Beltway insiders can't figure out why most of America is down on Obama

While Washington talks about Obama’s new mojo, polls show voters outside the Beltway are sulking — soured on the president, his party and his program. The Gallup Poll has Obama’s approval rating at an ominous 49 percent, after hitting a record low of 47 percent last weekend. A new poll in Pennsylvania, a bellwether industrial state, shows his numbers sinking, as did recent polls in Ohio and Florida.

So there are two Obamas: Rising in D.C., struggling in the U.S…

“Everyone in the pressure cooker in Washington got all excited like the millennium had arrived [when health care reform passed], but I don’t think most reasonable people read it that way,” Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said. Bredesen said people are worried about the cost and “appalled at the process in the Congress that produced it.”…

“The President undertook health care because it was the right thing for the country even though it was politically risky,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “We don’t share the media’s obsession with poll numbers, particularly months and months from an election. The politics of passing health care will be very good for Democrats. It’s only in this town that not having them fully realized in a matter of days would be seen as a failure.”