Bush making headway?

I'm still extremely nervous about this whole Social Security fight. I've heard over and over again that Bush's chances of success are slim, and I've heard over and over again how the Democrats are united against him.

But they're not really all that united. They're united, they say, against a proposal that will increase the budget deficit. But the Bush plan will actually be revenue neutral, in the long run, though it will involve massive borrowing in the coming decades. More ominously, Lindsey Graham has come up with a plan that would raise payroll taxes and cut benefits and create private accounts. I don't know the details of this, but it sounds like something that the Fainthearted Faction -- at this moment, apparently, Nelson, Lincoln, Baucus and Lieberman -- could get behind. One more Dem senator, and Social Security is done for.

This AP article today starts off sounding very ominous about Bush's chances, quoting Grassley as saying Bush has just a 90-day window to convince the public that there's a problem and that his solution is best.

"The length of the window for the education process might be 90 days," he told Iowa reporters this week. "If we don't see some grass-roots organizing and change of public opinion after 90 days, it's going to discourage people in Congress from moving ahead."

But then they get into some of the details of Graham's plan, and it starts to sound scarily palatable to the Faction.

And the article wraps up with this hair-raising nugget:

The key now, he said, is for the president to continue convincing people the problem is real.

Bush appears to have made some headway. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 66 percent of people who watched his State of the Union speech said his Social Security proposals will move the country in the right direction. That's up from 51 percent of Americans surveyed before the speech. Three in four said Bush made a "convincing case" that the government needs to take action in the next couple of years to change the system.

The telephone survey of 485 speech watchers, conducted Wednesday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

But there's one major error in these grafs: post-speech polls have shown that, by a wide majority, most of the people who actually watched Bush's speech were Republicans, and probably die-hard Republicans, at that. Not only was this one of the lowest-rated SOTU speeches in years, but it was also one of the most partisan in decades. I'm having trouble finding the numbers comparing this speech's audience make-up to those of past years, but Gallup said 52% of the audience identified itself as Republican, vs. 25% Democratic and 22% independent. I swear to God I saw an article comparing those numbers to previous years, but I'm having a bitch of a time finding it. Anyway, the AP writer -- Laura Meckler, who otherwise does a better job than her colleague, David Espo -- compares apples to oranges here in an effort to make it look like Bush is making headway. She compares a pre-speech poll of all Americans to a post-speech poll of only speech-watchers, who were mostly Republican. No wonder so many of them were "convinced" by his speech.