With apologies to my colleagues from Detroit, Mr. Fournier and Mr. Alberta, President Obama's trip to Washington State on Friday underscores one of the biggest overlooked success stories in American manufacturing: On the shoulders of new products and new airline strategies, Boeing has grown American jobs and its sales figures to record heights -- and this year it's likely to once again become the largest aerospace manufacturer in the world.

Obama visited Paine Field, a plant just outside Everett, Washington, where workers are assembling the new 787 Dreamliner commercial airplanes (Paine Field is also the plant where Obama's own airplane, a 747, was constructed). While there, he was announcing new loan programs aimed at spurring export businesses; Boeing itself is providing more than $700 million in credits toward some of its parts suppliers.

While the automotive sector has gotten all the attention of late, the fierce rivalry between Boeing and Airbus has been similarly good for the American manufacturing sector. Boeing itself added a net 10,000 jobs last year, mostly in the Puget Sound region, as it amps up production of its 737, 777 and 787 lines, according to a Boeing spokesman. Airbus is based in Europe, but it has engineering facilities in Kansas and Alabama, and the company claims credit for supporting 180,000 manufacturing positions at suppliers in 40 states.

Four years after it was trendy in Democratic circles to liken Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt, it is safe to conclude that no one in the Obama re-election campaign will be borrowing FDR's "Happy Days are Here Again" as the theme song for 2012. Judging by recent speeches by the president and the first lady, a much likelier choice is the 2009 tune by He is We, "A Mess it Grows." Or maybe Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You," with its line, "'Cause nothing's going right. And everything's a mess."

Both Obamas left little doubt this week that things are still a mess even after three years of Obama rule. In a speech in Richmond, the first lady talked about "this mess." But she struck the right campaign theme, adding ,"Fortunately, over the past three years, we've worked very hard to dig ourselves out of this mess. Your president has worked very hard. And there's been a lot of wonderful progress made."

Then on Friday, the president pitched his government reorganization plan, even making rare use of a colorful chart. "I don't usually use props in my speeches," he acknowledged to laughter. But he wanted to show how complicated the current government makes things. "This is the system that small business owners face.  This is what they have to deal with if they want even the most basic answers to the most basic questions like how to export to a new country or whether they qualify for a loan."  Reflecting on the way, government treats businesses, he concluded, "It's a mess."

Somewhere, Lee Atwater is looking down on his home state in disbelief. This can't be what the father of the modern political attack had in mind: a Republican using the modern version of his diabolical invention against another Republican in South Carolina.

King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the newly-released destroy-the-front-runner vehicle from the super PAC run by rival Newt Gingrich's political operatives, blames Mitt Romney for everything from endlessly high unemployment, to the demise of American manufacturing to the destruction of the modern marriage. Visually, it's a montage of smoke-filled rooms, suitcases filled with cash and glinting corporate headquarters juxtaposed with images of cracked sidewalks in broken small towns and the haggard faces of former factory workers.

Over the top? Sure. A gross violation of Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment to Republicans to speak no ill of fellow Republicans? Hands down it is. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul condemned the film as full of "blatant falsehoods and fabrications."

But the most important point about Gingrich's movie is that it works. And if it is unleashed full force on South Carolina voters as promised, it has the potential to do serious damage to Romney's lead in the state's Jan. 21 primary. That's how powerful it is.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The only five men standing between Mitt Romney and the Republican presidential nomination took a walk Saturday night -- attacking each other and the media as the former Massachusetts governor coasted toward the brass ring.

The bump recorded for President Obama's approval rating in two national surveys released Tuesday captures his success in framing the debate against congressional Republicans on extending the payroll tax cut. But over the long term, Obama's ability to sustain those gains (which pushed his approval rating to 49 percent in both the ABC/Washington Post and the CNN/ORC survey) will probably turn on the trajectory of Americans' attitudes about the economy.

The latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey, released last week, captures a paradox: groups that supported Obama in the 2008 election are generally more negative in describing their current economic situation than groups that resisted him. But the supportive groups are much more optimistic than the critical groups about where the economy is headed - and generally, though not uniformly, more positive on the impact of Obama's agenda on their economic prospects.

The table below looks at economic attitudes among nine groups that Obama carried in 2008, and nine that preferred Republican nominee John McCain, according to the 2008 exit polls. The results are taken from the most recent Heartland Monitor, conducted by FTI Strategic Communications, a communications-strategy consulting firm; the poll surveyed 1,200 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from November 30 to December 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points

President Obama's "fair shot" address Tuesday may be remembered as one of his best, a searing and historically poignant account of the greatest challenge of the American experiment: How do we give every citizen, rich or poor, a path to the good life?

But his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., with its echoes of Theodore Roosevelt's appearance in the same city a century ago, also exposed the limits of Obama's presidency and personality. Obama is a man of his times, and this is a lousy time to command what TR called the "bully pulpit."

OYSTER BAY, N.Y. -- In a display case at Sagamore Hill, the historic estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, a polished blue tablet reads, "By the turn of the century, business trusts controlled 65 percent of American wealth and Wall Street dictated the course of the American economy." A century-old editorial cartoon depicts the president firing a gun at a portly man with "The Trusts" scrawled upon the man's ample belly.

In a display case at Sagamore Hill, the historic estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, a polished blue tablet reads, "By the turn of the century, business trusts controlled 65 percent of American wealth and Wall Street dictated the course of the American economy." A century-old editorial cartoon depicts the president firing a gun at a portly man with "The Trusts" scrawled upon the man's ample belly.

My 14-year-old son soaked this in with a laugh during a Thanksgiving weekend visit to the national park. "TR rocked," Tyler said. "Can Obama be the next TR?"

That is a question I've been asking myself since 2008 when I did a series of stories with a colleague of mine at The Associated Press about the presidency and the role of that office in these times of immense change. One of the series' shorter pieces, written in March 2008, suggested that Obama and GOP candidate John McCain had the potential to be "TR 2.0."

"We're living in an era of brutal transition not unlike the turn of the last century, when Teddy Roosevelt and fellow Progressive reformers helped lead an anxious nation from the agriculture era to the industrial age," I wrote at the time.

The transition from an industrial economy to the information age and a global economy is creating problems that TR would recognize: A widening gap between the rich and poor, decreased social mobility and a loss of faith in social institutions, particularly politics. Into that breach stepped Obama, a transitional figure who promised a new breed of  leadership that was bigger than partisanship.

He helped lead the country out of a financial crisis, ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden and pushed through landmark health care reforms (with echoes of TR's agenda), but Obama's presidency is not nearly as transformational as Roosevelt's. At least not yet.

With voters as anxious and angry as they were at the dawn of the 20th century, it makes sense that Obama would travel to Osawatomie, Kansas, this week to draw a line from TR's presidency to his. On Aug. 31, 1910, Roosevelt delivered his New Nationalism address in Osawatomie, where he argued on behalf of a government powerful enough to regulate the economy and guarantee social justice.

"I stand for the square deal," Roosevelt said. "But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."

Roosevelt called for a broad range of social and political reforms including a national health service, social insurance for the elderly, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, workers' compensation for work-related injuries, a federal income tax and the right for women to vote.

He railed against the influence of special interests on politics, calling for strict limits and disclosure of campaign donations and the registration of lobbyists.

Roosevelt lost the 1912 election after he bolted the GOP and created the so-called Bull Moose Party, running second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But many of the reforms he laid out in Kansas were adopted by Wilson and Roosevelt's cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

TR thought and acted boldly. He was bigger than any party, a sturdy bridge to the new century. His policies were right for his troubled times.

The question today is whether Obama and his policies are right for these.

In my column this week, I analyze how the upscale and downscale wings of the evolving Republican coalition could divide over retrenching Medicare and Social Security if the GOP wins unified power in 2012.

The same polling I used to highlight that fissure also points to other potentially significant areas of convergence and divergence between the traditional college-educated core of the GOP base, and the growing non-college, working-class component of the party's coalition. These contrasts could presage other strains that Republicans might face implementing an agenda if they sweep control of the White House, House and Senate next year.

Another big potential divide in the party centers on trade. Almost all national GOP leaders support expanding free trade agreements. But an October National Journal/United Technologies Congressional Connection Poll found much more ambivalence in the GOP base when it asked Americans whether they supported or opposed the free trade agreements Congress recently approve with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.

My post yesterday on the so-called super committee's so-real failure ("Shame On Us, Washington") drew criticism from the White House, its Democratic allies and some journalists.

Shame.

Shame on Republicans for a stubborn unwillingness to seriously consider tax increases.

Shame on Democrats for keeping a closed mind to significant benefit cuts.

Electoral analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the liberal Center for American Progress will publish tomorrow a comprehensive demographic and geographic roadmap to the 2012 presidential campaign that political junkies of all ideological stripes will want to keep close at hand.

In their new paper, The Path to 270, the two correctly lay out, I believe, the critical dynamics that will likely tip the balance in both the Electoral College and popular vote next year. President Obama's biggest headwind, they argue, will be disappointment in his handling of the economy; his biggest tailwind will be ongoing demographic change that continues to bend the electorate in his direction.

After Obama's victory in 2008, I argued that he had assembled a "coalition of the ascendant": that is, he ran best among groups that were themselves growing in society, like minorities, the Millennial generation and college-educated whites, especially women.

Teixeira and Halpin draw on that concept to argue that the unbroken wave of demographic change makes it likely that these groups, which remain the most favorable to Obama, will constitute an even larger share of the vote in 2012 than they did last time. They project that the minority share of the vote will rise from 26 percent in 2008 to 28 percent in 2012, an increase commensurate with the average election to election rise since 1992 (National Journal reached a similar conclusion in its analysis, The Next America). And they project that college-educated whites will increase their share of the vote from 35 percent in 2008 to 36 percent in 2012. (Overlapping with both those trends, they calculate that 16 million more Millennials will be eligible to vote in 2012 than in 2008.) Whites without a college degree, the most solidly Republican component of the electorate, they expect to continue their generation-long decline, from 39 percent of the vote last time to 36 percent in 2012. (In 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected, those non-college whites alone constituted an absolute majority of the electorate, 53 percent.)

New polls released late last week in three behemoth swing states underscore a central opportunity Mitt Romney could provide Republicans in the general election-and the threat he could pose to President Obama.

In the Quinnipiac University surveys in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania released on November 10, Romney ran more strongly against President Obama than Rick Perry, Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. One key reason: Romney performed much better than his rivals among college-educated white voters.

It's always hazardous to analogize too aggressively from one election to another. But the scale of the union-led victory Tuesday in the drive to repeal Republican Gov. John Kasich's anti-collective bargaining legislation in Ohio is bound to encourage Democrats who want President Obama to pursue a class-conscious populist appeal in 2012.

The referendum repealed legislation that the Republican State House and Senate approved without a single Democratic vote and that Kasich signed last March; the bill sharply curtailed the collective bargaining rights of public employees (including police officers and fire fighters, who are often exempted from similar Republican bills), and imposed cutbacks on pay and benefits. Overall, just over three-fifths of voters on Tuesday backed the repeal, in a prototypical swing state where Republicans swept in 2010.

In my National Journal column this week, I touch on the debate among Democrats about whether President Obama's increasingly populist message - particularly his emphasis on asking wealthy Americans to pay more in taxes, both to reduce the deficit and to fund his jobs program - risks the party's support with white-collar white voters who have become increasingly critical to its electoral coalition.

In the column, Mark Penn, the initial chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary campaign and pollster for Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection, expressed the fears of those who worry that Obama will drive away upper white-collar whites who have moved toward the Democrats over the past two decades. By making higher taxes on the wealthy "such a big part of his solution, [Obama] is in fact just splitting his coalition," Penn insisted.

At a National Journal conference this week previewing the 2012 election, Geoff Garin, who succeeded Penn atop Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2008, expressed the opposite view during a panel I moderated. "This label of populism ignores the reality of the conversation that's going on and the positions that President Obama represents in the debate," Garin said. "You know, it's only about 75 percent of the public that supports a millionaire's tax. The Republicans can have the other 25 percent. We'll take the 75."

This dispute marks one of the critical strategic decisions Obama faces. It revolves around a straightforward question: will upper middle-class voters believe that Obama is targeting them when he talks about asking more from the rich, or will they share the sense that people on the very top rungs of the economic ladder have gotten off too easy and need to contribute more? Recent volumes of the United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll published in National Journal Daily offer some insight on the dispute-and some support for each side's argument.