This morning, I read conflicting reports on who has an edge over whom in the Obama-GOP face-off.

On one hand, the GOPs declares themselves the winners. The Hill reports a GOP document distributed to lawmakers says “House Republicans won their televised debate with President Barack Obama last month” at their winter retreat in Baltimore. The document “notes that Obama’s job approval ratings have dipped since the Jan. 29 meeting while Republican numbers have soared.” Though “many political observers said Obama came away victorious” from the exchanges, Republican leaders “are disputing that conventional wisdom, citing recent polls that indicate that they won the battle.”

On the other hand, the New York Times reports that at “a time of deepening political disaffection and intensified distress about the economy, President Obama enjoys an edge over Republicans in the battle for public support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.” The poll shows that “while the president is showing signs of vulnerability on his handling of the economy — a majority of respondents say he has yet to offer a clear plan for creating jobs — Americans blame former President George W. Bush, Wall Street and Congress much more than they do Mr. Obama for the nation’s economic problems and the budget deficit, the poll found.” The poll “suggests that Mr. Obama and his party have an opportunity to deflect the anger and anxiety if they can frame the election not as a referendum on the president and his party, but as a choice between them and a Republican approach that yielded results under Mr. Bush that much of the nation still blames for the country’s woes.”

This sounds right to me. No matter how low in the polls Obama falls, Republicans won’t go anywhere if they can’t prove that they have learned a lesson in the last three years and that they understand how capitalism should work. Independents and tea-party protestors are likely to make a difference in the next election and they aren’t buying this new jobs bill, no matter how bipartisan it is. They likely are not buying the idea that a tax credit to hire new people is the key to this mess, either. Businesses that have no customers won’t be hiring until they do.

Here is an e-mail from a reader from a response to my post yesterday, but I think it fits nicely here:

Our contracting business got three calls from clients in January 2009: 1) Cancel; 2) Cancel; and 3) Cancel. We had put away a nice bit of money in 2008, which we spent to live on in 2009, along with liquidating an IRA and another pension account. We have started 2010 with a decent size project, made more profitable by the fact that my husband has no employees; he dropped his Workers Comp policy and is literally doing all the “heavy lifting,” at age 56, himself. (I have called our three Congressional reps and informed them of our no-employee status, adding that we are most definitely NOT hiring until someone in power shows the slightest understanding of how capitalism and small business work.)

Is someone listening?