Is Obama Ending 2009 Where He Wants to Be?

ABC News’ Teddy Davis reports: Is President Obama ending 2009 where he wants to be? Not at all, said ABC News correspondent Yunji de Nies during a Wednesday appearance on ABCNews.com’s “Top Line”  Appearing from Hawaii where she is covering President Obama’s working vacation, de Nies discussed the latest developments in the Underwear Bomber case before offering her assessment on President Obama’s first year. “You saw plummeting poll numbers throughout the year,” said de Nies. “This president has had to deal with challenges on so many fronts. Take the economy: obviously, he had two major government expenditures with TARP and with the Recovery Act. We’re talking about $800 and $700 billion, respectively, there. The economy, obviously, is not where . . . it is supposed to be . . . we still see unemployment rates in the double digits.” “Health care looks like it’s going to pass but he doesn’t get his public option something that obviously he had pushed so hard for,” she continued. “A lot of people feel like this bill is watered down and at the same time Democrats may pay a penalty for it in the upcoming midterm elections.” “Then, of course, you have internationally, we’re dealing now with a terrorism threat. The President has not closed Guantanamo, that’s a campaign promise that he will miss. And obviously, Guantanamo now, what you were talking about in regards to Yemen, becomes a much bigger liability. So the President on basically all fronts has so much to deal with; I don’t think he’s where he wants to be at all.” Watch it HERE. During the second segment of ABC’s “Top Line,” we talked with Politico’s Jonathan Martin about the internal divisions that could face Republicans and Democrats in 2010. “There is a sort of anti-Washington fervor that is really building out in the grassroots of this country,” said Martin. “The question is: ‘Can Republicans harness it for their own opportunity, trying to take back the House and the Senate? Or will it get the best of them and actually split their party by driving a wedge between their moderate wing and some of these more purist sort of Tea Party-types?” On the Democratic side, mounting anxiety about next year’s elections is suddenly reviving a debate that has split the Democratic Party for a generation: Should they tack to the center to appeal to independent voters?  Or remain true to their progressive ideals in the hopes of motivating the liberal base? This debate, which Martin wrote about earlier today for Politico, was intensified last week when former Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, a moderate Democrat who chaired Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, penned a Washington Post op-ed urging his party to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters “has not won the support of a majority of Americans.” Daley wants Democrats to steer “a more moderate course” on the key issues of the day, “from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.”  Asked where he thinks President Obama will ultimately come down in this debate, Martin noted that the president will do his best to transcend the divide. “The White House believes that some of these concerns are a little bit stuck in the past,” said Martin. “This whole “DLC vs. Liberal” conversation is sort of, you know, a 1980s StarTrek relic.”  “The times have changed,” Martin continued. “And these sort of issues that divide aren’t quite the same anymore and I think you hear that quite a bit from liberals, too, that like, people like Daley are living in the past when every time Democrats were thought to be having a down moment the concern was ‘we’re too liberal, we have to get back to the middle.’ Those old rules just don’t apply anymore, according to a lot of Democrats now. But . . . the Bill Daleys of the world still think you have to appeal to the moderate middle.” Watch it HERE. Wednesday’s edition of ABC’s “Top Line” was co-anchored by ABC News correspondent Rachel Martin and ABC News’ deputy political director Teddy Davis. ABC News’ Kim Berryman contributed to this report.