Here's an article from March suggesting that this story may be inaccurate.
Its contains a little insight about public opinion that'll be worth talking about next week. Public opinion tends to move away from the position of the party in power:
Voters serve as “thermostats” for public policy. They move in the opposite direction as the party controlling the White House—to the left under Republican administrations and to the right under Democratic administrations. It is as if when the government does too much, or is “too hot,” the public says “cool it.” And when the government does too little, or is “too cold,” the public says “turn up the heat in here.”
So after Obama was elected in 2008, thermostatic public opinion soon moved against him. See the graph below, which uses an omnibus measure of the public’s support for government programs that was created by political scientist James Stimson from hundreds of different survey questions. In this graph, the absolute numbers are arbitrary; by itself, “50” doesn’t mean anything. The key is how the numbers shift over time.
Under Reagan, the public became more liberal, in contrast to the prevailing view that Reagan’s skills as a communicator made the public more conservative. During the Obama administration, as during the Clinton administration, there has been another shift to the right. Far from ushering in a liberal majority, the Obama administration has presided over a shift among Americans toward preferring less government, not more government. Obama has helped to increase the overall conservatism of the American public more than Reagan ever did, ironically enough.
