Later this month, former President George W. Bush will make his first public visit to the White House in more than two years, reports The Dallas Morning News. He will be joined by his wife, Laura:

"[They will be] honored by President Barack Obama with the unveiling of their official portraits that will hang at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The White House confirmed on Friday that the Bushes are slated to revisit their Washington home of eight years on May 31 for a rare joint appearance between the current and past presidents."

The 43rd president, who has shied away from the spotlight since leaving office, was in Washington earlier this week for a "Celebration of Freedom" in which he advocated the U.S. taking a more active role in supporting democracy movements abroad. He joked, "I actually found my freedom by leaving Washington." (Watch the CBS News video.)

Bush's previous high-profile visit to the Obama White House was in January 2010. He joined Obama and another former president, Bill Clinton, in heading up a fundraising project for earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

In politics as elsewhere perception is often reality. Which would seem to be the problem for House Republicans right about now in their battle to win the message war with Democrats in the fight over how to extend the payroll-tax holiday past the end of the year.

The stalemate deepened Tuesday with the House GOP rejecting a Senate bill that would have extended the tax holiday for two months, giving Republican and Democratic negotiators more time to work on a longer-term solution.

House Republicans said they rejected the Senate legislation because they preferred a one-year extension.

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Poll after poll shows Newt Gingrich with a commanding lead for the Republican nomination for president.

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is the gaudiest yet, giving the former speaker of the House 40 percent among Republicans across the country, nearly double the number for erstwhile front-runner Mitt Romney.

The sudden surge by the always-controversial Gingrich has sprung a gusher of emotion from the political class: primarily delight among Democrats and horror in some quarters of the GOP.

Gingrich, whose campaign was all but moribund a few months ago, has reacted with a cocky sort of "knew it all along" smile and a pithy quote: "I will be the nominee."

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August has been a month of devastating disapproval for both the Obama White House and the gridlocked Congress.

Poll after poll has highlighted the president's declining popularity — approval ratings around 40%, the lowest of his presidency — yet noted with appropriate amazement that the Congress' numbers are less than half as good.

The sheer lack of coordination between the parties and branches of government was a salient argument in the decision by the S&P rating agency to downgrade U.S. creditworthiness.

And a host of observers and commentators at home and abroad have suggested the dysfunction laid bare in the debt ceiling debate this summer was threatening the fragile economic recovery and straining the very fabric of American democracy.

So how have the White House and Congress responded? With a display of peevish political gamesmanship that would be comical if the nation's mood were not so ugly.

On the last day of this angst-ridden August, the White House proposed a presidential speech to a joint session of Congress, long expected to happen next week. But the time chosen was 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 7, the precise moment when MSNBC was planning to air a debate among the Republican candidates for president from the Ronald Reagan Library in California.

The White House called the timing coincidental. Republicans cried foul. And House Speaker John Boehner said the proposed time was too close to the House's official start of its fall session at 6:30 p.m. that same evening to be practicable. Boehner suggested the next night.

The blogosphere caught fire. Republicans insisted the president was messing with their nomination process. Democrats urged the president to stand firm.

The White House said it had vetted the Wednesday night timing with the Speaker in advance. The Speaker's office denied it. The Speaker said he was prepared to offer the following night on behalf of the "bipartisan leadership" of Congress, even though all the Democratic leaders said they had heard nothing from Boehner.

And after a flurry of finger-pointing in and from all directions, the White House gave in and said the speech could be Thursday night after all. The White House looked whipped, and wailing from the president's partisans immediately filled the air.

But what else was the man to do, in the end, given the exposure created by the original White House gambit? Should he show up on Wednesday night to an empty House chamber? Give the speech someplace else? Go on for days kvetching about the unprecedented rebuff by the Speaker, the intransigence of the House Republicans and the sheer disrespect both imply?

The president could have done any of these things, but it would not have brought the government any closer to stimulating any additional economic growth or creating any jobs. And it probably would not have done him much good politically, either.

The truth is, for the partisans who are driving the process in Washington, improving the economy and creating jobs is less important than winning the elections of 2012.

But for a president, there is still a distinction between what serves political ends and what helps the country. He can choose one or the other, but he knows his decision will have real consequences. That sets him apart from all the people with access to the internet, and it sets him apart from leaders in Congress as well.

But why did the White House wade into this particular miasma in the first place? Was it coincidence that Wednesday night was the first debate to include the new GOP front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry? Or was it a naked effort to upstage the opposition?

It might have been one or the other or even both. The first day next week when both House and Senate are back at work is Wednesday. The next night, Thursday, is far less appealing because it is the night the NFL kicks off its new season. Friday night? No president who wants an audience ever asks for a joint session on a Friday night, much less a weekend.

So if the president was going to talk to Congress in its first week back on the job, well, it looked like Wednesday night would have to be the night. That is, if the speech was going to get on TV and have an audience. If MSNBC wanted to schedule the debate an hour later, the Republican hopefuls could enjoy a two-hour rebuttal to the president's speech.

Everyone might have been happy, except that nothing was arranged before the White House made its announcement. And nothing could be arranged in the orgy of recrimination that followed.

For those who have been watching the summer unfold in the capital, it seemed all too plausible that everyone's version of this comical Rashomon had at least some truth in it — and a great deal of defensive self-interest.

We have seen before that Boehner negotiates deals he cannot get the House majority to accept. The more conservative elements of the GOP coalesce to defy him. In the past, some speakers have run the House majority. More often in recent years, the House majority runs the speaker.

And, just as sadly, we have seen the White House groping toward a grasp on the new majority culture in the House. The president's inner circle, apparently caught off guard by the debt ceiling crisis, still seems shocked at the eagerness with which House Republicans seized that moment and reordered the fiscal world in a matter of weeks.

In this episode, the Obama team's maladroit posture regarding Congress is as awkward as ever. Is it impossible to think the White House could actually find a conduit to the House that could provide reliable intelligence and, perhaps, a context for real negotiation?

And for their part, did the denizens of Capitol Hill get the message from the hustings in this summer of discontent?

It depends on which message you mean.

It appears they did not hear the voices calling for reason, civility, bipartisanship or whatever one wishes to call traditional compromise and consensus.

More likely, they listened to those in their respective power bases who told them to fight harder and never give an inch. Judging by the last day of this wretched month, that is the message from home that the warring tribes of Washington have taken to heart.

If you are feeling a bit underwhelmed by the current field of Republican candidates for president, you need not feel alone.

A new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds that only one American in four has a good or excellent impression of the prospective challengers to President Obama – whose own poll numbers suggest he is vulnerable in 2012.

On NPR's "All Things Considered" Thursday, Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut noted that the Democrats' candidates drew similar responses 20 years ago in the run-up to the 1992 election. Yet Democrat Bill Clinton emerged from the primaries to defeat the incumbent Republican president, George H.W. Bush.

In a separate survey done with The Washington Post, Pew allowed respondents to choose among terms to describe the existing GOP field. The most popular was "unimpressed."

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It did not take long for President Obama to hit the high note he wanted in his State of the Union speech. Members of Congress and other grandees of government had scarcely settled into their seats when the president launched into his theme of national unity.

"No matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is part of something greater," the president said. "We are part of the American family...bound together as one people...common hopes...common creed."

In the next few minutes, the president spoke the word "together" five times.

"We will move forward together, or not at all," he said, summing up his appeal for bipartisanship in the coming Congress.

"That's the project the American people want us to work on. Together."

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If we're looking for a good name for this week's Republican tsunami, here's a vote for calling it the 60-40 election.

Exit polls show 6 in 10 independent voters this week named the economy as the country's top problem (no other issue was even a contender).  No surprise that among those who saw it as the top problem, nearly all thought economic conditions in the U.S. were bad and might be worse next year. And no surprise that when asked about the country's direction, 6 in 10 said it was on the wrong track.

Similarly, almost 6 in 10 voters who usually call themselves independents told exit pollsters they had voted Republican this time. That's an enormous turnabout from the 2006 and 2008 cycles, when a similarly disproportionate share of the independents expressed their unease and disapproval by voting Democratic.

This year, of course, the targeted party had flipped. The Republicans who were scapegoats of the last two elections of George W. Bush's presidency had become the cavalry, riding to the rescue.

Six-in-10 just keeps cropping up.

60-40 All Around; Read More:

Ted Sorensen, who died of a stroke in New York this weekend at the age of 82, was already a lion in winter when he became aware of a newly elected senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

Obama, then just 44, reminded Sorensen of another young senator he had counseled long ago, John F. Kennedy. Sorensen was two years out of law school when he went to work for JFK in the early 1950s, supplying advice on everything from policy to politics and prose. He wrote the first drafts for chapters of Profiles in Courage, the 1956 book that won Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize.

Sorensen traveled with the ambitious young senator from Massachusetts and became his intellectual alter ego. The speeches they produced together became classics, especially the 1961 Inauguration Address ("Ask not what your country can do for you ... ") — in many ways the curtain raiser for the decade that followed.

In the Kennedy White House, Sorensen liked to say, the president served as his own chief of staff. But Sorensen as counselor was a near-constant presence.

Nixon Said Sorensen Had A 'Rare Gift' For Phrases:

We're down to the last days of the campaign, so wherever President Obama goes is going to be read as a metaphor.

That's why people are scratching their heads about the first stop on the president's last itinerary on behalf of his congressional majorities. The 5th District of Virginia, home of freshman Democrat Tom Perriello, has been on every list of the endangered, usually near the top, since the campaign began.

So why does the president want to head into the final weekend smiling and waving by the side of a guy most people expect will lose? Is he sending some kind of a signal?

Well, yes, a rather mixed signal. And like a lot of the messages that come from this president, it may be lost on many. But let's try to unbraid it for a moment and see what we've got.

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California's race for governor is too close to call, because after spending $140 million or more, 54-year-old Republican candidate Meg Whitman has yet to put away her 72-year-old Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown, who was elected governor of the state for the first time when he was half his present age.

Brown, now the state's attorney general, has been hanging in there, despite having to apologize for an aide who used the word "whore" in a discussion of Whitman's relationship to a police union. Brown saved most of the $32 million he raised for the last weeks, while Whitman has spoken of supplementing the roughly $20 million she has raised for her first run at elected office with as much as $150 million of her own.

Whitman's campaign has been troubled, not only by the staggering weight of its media buys but also by her story of employing an undocumented worker unawares. Given the salience of the immigration issue in California, this episode has raised as many eyebrows as the sexual allegations against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did when he first ran in 2003.

Brown and Whitman each have much to offer on the positive side, too, of course, and in the end they are probably the smartest pair of major-party nominees for governor anywhere in the country. So why does either one want to run a state with a population approaching 40 million, seemingly insuperable problems and a paralyzing partisan split in its power structure?

Some say the campaign has been so negative and nasty that both deserve to lose.

But wouldn't it be far more fitting punishment if both won?

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As Democrats campaign furiously to contain their losses in this midterm election season, two familiar names dominate their effort and their future.

The names of course are Obama and Clinton: Two names, three politicians monumentally ambitious in different ways, and one unending psychodrama for their party and country.

President Obama this fall is both the featured performer-fundraiser for Democrats and the featured target in attack ads aired by Republicans and their allied organizations.

But right behind him on the campaign trail is Bill Clinton, the former president whose relationship to his party has been through every conceivable permutation over the past two decades. He has been rising star, breakthrough candidate, millstone, conundrum, pariah, rallying point, comeback kid and gray eminence — with encore performances in some roles.

Now he's back as the hardest-hitting road warrior the beleaguered Democrats have in this season of travail.  That's why he'll be in California this weekend for his old rival Jerry Brown, now running for another go at the governorship.

After that, Clinton will head for Washington state to shore up Patty Murray, a Democrat first elected to the Senate on the same day Clinton won the presidency in 1992. Obama will be in the state three days later.

Obama-Clinton In 2012? Read More

Just last week, Pennsylvania, political scientist Terry Madonna was chatting with NPR political reporter Don Gonyea when he mentioned a piece of time-honored American lore: People don't pay attention to the election until after the World Series is over.

If you follow politics, you've heard some version of that line many times. And it's always had a ring of truth. Many American voters habitually put off thinking about voting until they have to. Any distraction will do, and the "the fall classic" is a lovely, mythic distraction.

This year, however, will be different from all others. Those putting off their voting decision until after the World Series of 2010 may miss the election of 2010 altogether. That's because for the first time, the November election may be over before the Series ends.

How did it come to this? And is there anything constitutional government can do to correct such a travesty?

Good questions. Let's take them one at a time.

'Mr. November'? That Sounds Like A Centerfold; Read More:

What do we do with the end of TARP?

And what do we do with the news that TARP will not have cost anything like the $700 billion we thought it would? What if it really cost $50 billion, or less?

What if, in the end, the Troubled Asset Relief Program so controversial at birth and vilified throughout its two years of life turns out to have turned a profit for the government and the taxpayer?

We — most of the news media this is — simply don't know what to do with this news.

TARP-As-Hero? What About TARP-As-Beelzebub? Read More:

Every election is at least a little different from all that went before. We in the media, in our struggle to capture the uniqueness of each campaign, rely on a key voter group we see as the most appealing, facile explanation for the eventual outcome. This is especially compelling if we can think of a cute catch phrase to describe them.

You remember the "NASCAR dads" of 2000 and 2004? They were the masculine rejoinder against the oft-cited influence of the "soccer moms" of 1996, who later morphed into "security moms" who were more angst-ridden about 9/11 than about work, school and recreation league schedules.

Going back a bit further we had the truly seminal "angry white males" of 1994, whom we now recall as bulling their way into the polls in a veritable boil to vote Republican and send a message to Bill (and Hillary) Clinton.  That led to Republican majorities in the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. And a similar surge among white males is entirely possible this fall.

There's more than a dash of media myth-making amidst the facts in each of these cases, of course. Any and all of these groups will be part of the mix in any election — including this November's midterms. We just don't know ever know what their proportions in the mix will be, and on top of that we are always looking for that particular straw that will stir the drink this time around.

On the other hand, maybe this year's key voting group will be the one that doesn't get in the mix at all. This could be the year of the "weary working women." They are tired from carrying the economic burdens for their families, and they may just be tired of carrying the water for the Democrats as well.

Why Would They Go To The Polls? Read More:

When Republican leaders of the House gather in a lumberyard in Sterling, Va., this morning to embrace what they call their "Pledge to America," they will be trying to recapture some of the media magic of an earlier campaign effort widely credited with helping them capture control of the House in 1994.

It was called the "Contract with America," and it was the brainchild of that era's Republican leadership, spearheaded by Newt Gingrich. Relying on polling data to pick issues with 60% or more support among voters and lifting sizable chunks of Ronald Reagan's speeches, Gingrich and his lieutenants put together a wish list they thought would capture the public imagination.

The Contract was signed amidst great fanfare on the West Front of the Capitol on a spectacularly beautiful September day 16 years ago. In the collective and selective memory that is conventional wisdom, the Contract has become far more than just a successful campaign gimmick. It has become a kind of cause in itself.

Yet there remains little hard evidence that the Contract contributed much to the wave that carried Republicans into power across much of the national government structure that fall, at both federal and state levels, including their first House majority in 40 years.

Polls And Other Evidence Deflate The Myth — Read More: