Rush Limbaugh may beg to differ, but lockstep votes against President Obama's stimulus package like the one seen in the House this week are steadily adding blue dye to the electoral map, according to a new poll by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

A survey of 1,200 voters in 40 traditionally Republican congressional districts now held by Democrats Greenberg's firm conducted between Jan. 14 to 19 shows Obama's post-election honeymoon reaching a rapturous stage, with 44 percent of voters strongly supporting his policies.

A full 64 percent favor his economic plan, compared to 27 percent against. And precisely that same proportion favors the stimulus in 13 states that are expected to have competitive Senate races in 2010: Kentucky, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Colorado, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Greenberg says an incumbent's support for the economic plan appears to make voters more likely to reelect the lawmaker -- particularly good news for the 20 or so Democrats who in November captured districts that former President Bush carried in 2004. He said one-third of Republicans and two-thirds of independents are leaning with Obama's general goals on the recovery.

If he’s not just a trial balloon and actually becomes President Obama’s Commerce secretary, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire won’t just get to weigh in on business policies. He would get to be a member of Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s middle-class task force, which will consider a wider range of social policies.

The task force would include the secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce, as well as other White House advisers. So Gregg would serve on the panel with liberal Democrats like former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle — who’s in line to head HHS — and Democratic Rep. Hilda L. Solis, who’s on track to be the new Labor secretary.

All of which means Gregg would have to decide whether to keep fighting the “Obama Spend-o-Rama” — the phrase he came up with last year to describe all of the spending initiatives Obama proposed on the campaign trail.

So what Republican ideas, exactly, did Democrats include in that stimulus bill that got no Republican votes in the House yesterday? Oddly enough, the one the White House keeps mentioning was an idea that came from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Yes, that Eric Cantor. Otherwise known as, the guy whose job was to make sure no Republicans voted for it.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has given Cantor credit for suggesting that the spending in the stimulus bill be made as transparent as possible, with all of the details posted on the Internet so the public can track where the money is going. (He just told the same story again at today’s press briefing.)

It doesn’t sound like House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio is losing any sleep over the fact that no Republicans voted for the stimulus, despite President Obama’s visit to the Hill Tuesday to hear their concerns.

In fact, the memo he just sent out to House Republicans, setting up their three-day retreat that starts today, praises his colleagues for not bucking the party line and casting votes that might allow Obama — and the Democrats — to claim they had achieved bipartisanship.

“When we meet later today at The Homestead, we’ll set to work immediately, building on the unity, common purpose, and common vision that brought us together over the past few weeks and culminated in last night’s vote,” Boehner wrote. “I am proud of our team, and eager to get to work.”

Maybe Obama never really had a chance.

There’s a bit of defensiveness at the end of a video message being circulated today by Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher of California, the chairwoman of the centrist New Democrat Coalition. It seems to be aimed at other fiscally conservative Democrats who might be a tad nervous about spending more than $800 billion on an economic stimulus package.

Tauscher’s message: Hey, I voted for it. We’ll do that deficit reduction thing later.

The Bush administration had a famously tense relationship with the White House press corps, no doubt exacerbated by events like Hurricane Katrina, the Valerie Plame scandal and the war in Iraq. Perhaps mindful of their predecessors' experiences, President Obama's team is taking fairly extraordinary steps to reach out to the rumpled scribes who frequent the White House briefing room.

How extraordinary? Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took a seat front-and-center among the reporters at Wednesday's daily press briefing to listen to press secretary Robert Gibbs spin the administration position on the stimulus package, Afghanistan and other hot-button issues.

While President Obama fielded questions from House and Senate Republicans about his stimulus plans, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. stopped by the weekly Senate Democratic luncheon this afternoon for a visit with his old colleagues.

Which wouldn’t be a surprise, except that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada seemed to have ruled out exactly that kind of visit in a newspaper interview last month.

In an effort to make a clean break with the era of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a regular at the weekly Senate Republican luncheons even as he pushed ever-expanding notions of executive power, Reid told the Las Vegas Sun that Biden would not be welcome to continue the practice.

If Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. picked his present job over secretary of State because it involves less travel, as is rumored, the gambit is backfiring. President Obama on Tuesday designated Biden the U.S. representative to the annual Munich Security Conference, which will take place Feb. 6 to 8 in the southern German city.

The annual gathering of heads of state, also known as the Wehrkundetagung to fans of German compound nouns, dates to 1962, when publisher Ewald von Kleist invited government leaders, scientists and members of the media to a wide-ranging discussion of foreign policy and security challenges that influence U.S.-European relations. Recent attendees include ex-Russian President Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

President Obama returned to Capitol Hill today to convince Republicans he’s serious about listening to their ideas. But the main thing he got was an earful from House Republicans about how the bill-writing process there was anything but bipartisan.

House Republican Conference chairman Mike Pence of Indiana gave Obama a particularly hard time about how little House Speaker Nancy Pelosi let Republicans participate in writing the stimulus bill, according to Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, one of Obama’s former Illinois colleagues.

But other Republicans also warned Obama that the “Pelosi push” undermined his talk of bipartisanship, said Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan.

“He got that. He heard our frustration,” said Upton. “Hopefully there will be some correction over the long term.”

Forget the audacity of hope. When it comes to preparing his administration's first budget, President Obama might have to embrace the necessity of restraint.

That's the underlying message the budget watchdogs at The Concord Coalition and ex-Congressional Budget Office directors Robert D. Reischauer, Alice M. Rivlin and Rudolph G. Penner spell out in a Jan. 27 memo to the new president. Warning that the administration's fiscal 2010 budget will be a defining document, the group urges Obama not to lose sight of inconvenient fiscal truths as he tries to grapple with the financial crisis and accompanying recession. Truths such as America's continued dependence on foreign investors, surging entitlement spending and escalating future deficits.

Oh, here's one more: the experts note Congress is unlikely to help make painful changes unless the public ratchets up pressure to do so.

The confirmation process is one of the most powerful oversight tools the Senate has, but as CQ’s Jonathan Allen points out, it almost never outright rejects a president’s Cabinet nominees.

That’s only happened nine times.

So when any significant number of senators votes against a nominee, it usually means trouble down the road.

It only took three days, but the Obama press operation has replaced the stodgy "Daily Press Briefing" graphics that flanked the press secretary's rostrum during the Bush years with a logo plugging the White House web site.

It's all fitting for a team that used net savvy, social networking sites and YouTube to stream all things Obama during the presidential campaign.

Indeed, the White House site already is taking on some of the whiz-bang feel of the campaign and currently features video of Obama's weekly address -- once a YouTube staple -- along with footage from last week's inaugural and bits from the Obama-Biden whistlestop train tour.

The president's top aide, Rahm Emanuel, has invited a group of moderate Republicans to a private White House meeting Tuesday amid a Democratic push to add bipartisan flavor to an $825 billion economic stimulus package making its way through Congress.

The smaller confab is scheduled to take place after Obama and Emanuel meet separately with large caucuses of congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats on Tuesday.

It appears to be something of a continuation of the bipartisan dinners Emanuel held with Republicans during his three-term stint as a Democratic House member from Chicago, and it is not clear whether the stimulus will be the focus of the meeting, one of many subjects or simply the $825 billion gorilla in the room.

As Congress prepares for a House vote on the stimulus bill this week and prep work in key Senate committees, it seems pretty clear how the Democrats are going to define "compromise" on the stimulus package and how Republicans are going to define it.

Democrats will say they've already compromised by including some tax cuts among all the spending initiatives. And Republicans will say it's not a compromise until there are more tax cuts.

Perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise.

So how’s the quest for bipartisanship going? Let’s put it this way: House Republican Leader John A. Boehner just resurrected the Republicans’ grudge match against their favorite villain of the 2008 campaign: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

That’s right — the same group they used to try to defeat Barack Obama last year.

Remember the glory days of the campaign, when Republicans were accusing the group of registering pretend voters to help Obama win the election?

Nothing really came of that, of course, and the issue seemed to drop right off the map.

The people who work for the Congressional Budget Office are used to being unpopular. They’re the ones who have to tell presidents and members of Congress, “Your plan won’t work.” But they’re probably not used to being dismissed by their old director.

To hear Democratic leaders tell it, though, that’s exactly what happened at this morning’s bipartisan leadership meeting with President Obama at the White House.

The budget office became a villain to Democrats, and a hero to Republicans, earlier this week when it released a report suggesting that most of the $355 billion House Democrats want to spend on highways and bridges won’t be spent until after the recession is over.

So this morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Peter R. Orszag, Obama’s new budget director, told congressional leaders not to worry too much about what CBO says.

As President Obama prepares for a meeting with House Republican leaders next week, there’s already a developing dynamic he’ll have to be careful of. Some Republicans, eyeing the new president’s popularity and reputation for listening, are treating him like the guy they go to when they think congressional Democrats are being mean to them.

It’s a situation that has developed mainly in the House, which isn’t too surprising, given that the House has been overflowing for many years with the kind of partisanship Obama says he wants to defeat. And that’s the challenge. Heal the partisan divisions in the House? That’s a bit like telling a first-time mountain climber to give Mount Everest a try.

Some of this is just basic divide-and-conquer strategy. At his weekly briefing Thursday morning, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio said Republican leaders were looking forward to discussing the stimulus package at the meeting with Obama next week (and at the bipartisan leadership meeting at the White House this morning, where House GOP leaders gave Obama a copy of their own economic plan).

It's almost a given that President Obama will reverse the federal curb on stem cell research that former President Bush put forward in August 2001. But just how he should do that is the subject of debate among biomedical research advocates.

As a senator, Obama backed 2005 legislation that would have overriden Bush's restriction, by allowing federal funding to be used for research on stem cell lines obtained from discarded human embryos originally created for fertility treatments.

Bush wound up vetoing the bill.

As a presidential candidate, Obama continued to support relaxing restrictions on a branch of science whose supporters believe will bring cures for juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease, various cancers and many other afflictions.

-- Adriel Bettelheim

It's the beginning of a new administration, and President Obama takes office with a strong Democratic majority in Congress. With one party controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, that means Obama will probably get everything he wants. The end.

Well, actually, he probably won't.

It's never that easy.

And that's why the tradeoffs between Congress and the White House will be worth watching closely -- especially now, with so much at stake not just for the new president and Congress, but for the country.

"Balance of Power" will focus on the relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill. It's a reported blog, looking at the latest developments that shed light on how well the executive and legislative branches are working together - or if they're not, what's getting in the way.

Most of the main developments will be captured in CQ's news stories, of course, so "Balance of Power" won't always be driven by the major issues of the day. But it will look at smaller developments and side angles that deserve more attention than they'd get otherwise, or that may have long-term significance in predicting the success or failure of the public policy agenda in Washington.

Sometimes the story will be told from the point of view of the Obama administration, as it looks at the work of Congress and tries to push for faster action on its agenda. In other cases, we'll look at how the story is viewed from various players on Capitol Hill -- Democratic leaders, as they try to work on the Obama agenda while maintaining their own independence; Republican leaders, as they seek a voice in the process and a path out of the political wilderness; and rank-and-file lawmakers who may have a unique take on events.

Over time, we hope "Balance of Power" will provide a valuable running narrative, from all angles, on Obama's efforts to steer a sharply different course than the nation has taken over the last eight years. And sometimes we may just throw in a funny story, too.

As always, please let us know if you have suggestions on what we can do better.