By JONATHAN WEISMAN And DANNY YADRON
President Barack Obama is riding a surge of public support into next week's State of the Union address, with more Americans approving of his performance and more seeing him as a political moderate, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
But public concern is coalescing around the stubbornly high unemployment rate, now 9.4%, a potential pitfall for the president. If rising optimism about the economic recovery dwindles, the surge of support could fade, pollsters say.
In the survey, 53% said they approved of the job Mr. Obama is doing as president, up eight percentage points from December. Forty-one percent said they disapprove of the president's performance, down from 48% last month. The poll surveyed 1,000 adults from Jan. 13-17.
Among political independents, positive views of Mr. Obama's job performance surpassed negative views for the first time since August 2009.
The poll was conducted days after a shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., in which six people died and 14 were injured, including Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic congresswoman from the state.
Surges in presidential popularity are common after a galvanizing national tragedy, said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who co-directs the Journal/NBC News poll with Democrat Peter Hart. Bill Clinton saw a four-point jump after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. George W. Bush saw a surge after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But those bounces can be fleeting. Mr. Clinton's faded in a month amid partisan arguments over the budget. Mr. Bush's lasted as the nation shifted onto a war footing.
The poll found that Republicans, whose hand in Congress was strengthened by the November elections, face low voter expectations, with a quarter of respondents saying the new House majority will bring the right kind of change to the country. In January, 2007, 42% of voters said the same of Democrats, as they assumed control of Congress.
Among those polled, 55% predicted Republican lawmakers would be too inflexible in dealing with the president. At the same time, 55% said Mr. Obama will strike the right balance between flexibility and standing his ground.
Mr. Hart, the pollster, said the results suggest that in dealing with Congress, "the president has the benefit of the doubt, and Republicans, based on this data, have the burden of proof."
Among the poll's respondents, James Barnes, a 59-year-old independent and a retired accountant in Blue Springs, Mo., said, "We've lived through a recent situation where the far left and the far right have been doing all the talking, and they're so far apart on solutions. Everyone is going to have to move toward the middle before things start getting done. I'm not so sure the tea-party folks who got elected are coming in with the thought we're moving toward the middle."
The poll comes after December's lame-duck session of Congress gave Mr. Obama the chance to tack to the center to notch major bipartisan victories on taxes and arms control, while winning the long-sought liberal goal of allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
More recently, Mr. Obama's nationally televised speech after the Arizona shootings was an opportunity to strike a tone of national unity that has eluded him since the presidential campaign. He is likely to reprise themes of national unity in the State of the Union. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have promised to sit together and adopt a less-partisan posture after the shootings.
A senior administration official said Mr. Obama is now well-positioned to win the public to his side if Republicans in Congress adopt hard-line stances on health care and spending to please their conservative base. White House officials want the president to be seen as the one extending a cooperative hand if relations between the parties break down.
Republicans said their agenda better reflects what voters want from government. "We've laid out an agenda that reflects what the American people's priorities are, something that we haven't seen from this administration in two years," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R., Ohio). "If they are willing to change course and address the people's priorities, that's great, but we haven't seen that yet."
The president's rising approval numbers come amid signs of optimism about the economy. This month, 40% of those surveyed said they believe the economy will improve over the next year, up from 32% in December. Only 17% said it would get worse, down from 24%.
Eduardo D. Sepulveda, a retired 65-year-old independent who lives northwest of San Antonio, said he disapproves of the way the president—for whom he voted in 2008—is handling the economy, but he still has "faith in him."
Such ambivalence tinged with optimism comes as Mr. Obama continues what appears to be a successful repositioning in the political center. Forty percent of Americans now see him as a moderate, up 10 percentage points from a year ago. The number calling him "very liberal" has declined from 33% in January 2010 to 27% now. Forty-four percent of independents now call the president a moderate, up from 28% a year ago.
Politically, Mr. Obama enters the election season in good shape. At this stage in 1995, Bill Clinton's approval rating stood at 45%, and he was two points behind then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the eventual GOP presidential nominee, in a theoretical match-up. By contrast, polls show Mr. Obama ahead of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee 51% to 41% and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich 54% to 35%.
"If there's a winning coalition against Obama, it's not anywhere close to forming," Mr. McInturff said.
But Mr. Obama has work to do if he is to assemble the coalition that gave him his comfortable victory in 2008. His approval ratings have jumped into positive territory in the Midwest, a good sign for him after the drubbing Democrats sustained there in November. But he trails among white men, especially those over 50, and with voters in the South and in rural America.
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