Digging into a couple of other polls that also show growing dissatisfaction with Obama, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent argues that the real takeaway should be that voters are unhappy with the economy, and not the jobs plan. When broken down into its constituent parts, the American Jobs Act polls well.

But that’s got to be scant consolation for the White House. Even if Americans support parts of the jobs plan in principle, Bloomberg’s polling indicates that “by a margin of 51 percent to 40 percent, Americans doubt the package of tax cuts and spending proposals intended to jumpstart job creation that Obama submitted to Congress this week will bring down the 9.1 percent jobless rate.”

Meanwhile, they really, really like their Medicare.

Obama’s obvious bet is that Republicans will reject the jobs plan, and the politically unsavory cuts to Medicare won’t materialize. That will leave him free to campaign against Republican obstructionism. But that also still leaves Obama with a bad economy chained around his neck. And if that’s what’s making voters unhappy, they will still be unhappy a year from now no matter how vociferously the president tears into the GOP.

So what does this all mean? First guess: Anyone looking to Congress, the White House or the supercommittee for answers to U.S. economic problems — or for even a hint as to the future direction of the U.S. economy, is almost certainly looking in the wrong place. The biggest downside threat to the U.S. economy, right now, is Europe. Whether or not Merkel can steer a path toward resolution of the Greek crisis will likely exert far more influence on American livelihoods than whether or not the payroll tax cut gets extended, or even whether Republicans succeed in forcing more austerity down U.S. throats.

Just how exposed U.S. banks are to Europe is a hotly debated question — some banking analysts claims direct exposure is relatively minimal, while others note that we just have no idea how much credit default swap insurance U.S. banks have sold to European banks.

Who ends up holding the bag if Europe implodes? Astonishing as this is to contemplate, just three years after credit swaps played a major role in precipitating the financial crisis of 2008, we just don’t know. But even in the midst of our ignorance, formulating a disaster scenario is child’s play.

If Greece slips into default (controlled or uncontrolled) and Italy follows down the insolvency garden path, French banks are certainly in big trouble. If the French banking sector collapses, at the very least, Europe will be headed for recession, and at worst, the interconnectedness of the global banking system will transmit chaos straight across the Atlantic to New York in less time than you can say “systemic event.”

Another recession in Europe would be bad enough — add yet another grim headwind to the troubles limiting U.S. growth. But another global credit crunch? Is it any wonder that every new headline from Europe seems to spark an immediate zig or zag in the U.S. stock market?

The poverty threshold for a family of four in 2010 was $22,314. Overall, real median household income declined by 2.3 percent in 2010.

Put these numbers together with what we already know about how the rich are faring in the U.S. — the top 10th of 1 percent takes home about 24 percent of all American wealth — and we have stunning confirmation of what a Citigroup analyst has labeled the “consumer hourglass economy.”  The wealthy are doing fine, while the number of those living in poverty grows, and the middle … the middle is just disappearing.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that big American consumer product companies are beginning to split their product offerings between retail lines aimed either at the low end or the high end.

For generations, Procter & Gamble Co.’s growth strategy was focused on developing household staples for the vast American middle class.

Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market shoppers are trading down to lower-priced goods — widening the pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the middle….

A wide swath of American companies is convinced that the consumer market is bifurcating into high and low ends and eroding in the middle. They have begun to alter the way they research, develop and market their products.

Food giant H.J. Heinz Co., for example, is developing more products at lower price ranges. Luxury retailer Saks Inc. is bolstering its high-end apparel and accessories because its wealthiest customers — not those drawn to entry-level items — are driving the chain’s growth.

But here’s the kicker:

To monitor the evolving American consumer market, P&G executives study the Gini index, a widely accepted measure of income inequality that ranges from zero, when everyone earns the same amount, to one, when all income goes to only one person. In 2009, the most recent calculation available, the Gini coefficient totaled 0.468, a 20 percent rise in income disparity over the past 40 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and Mexico — you’d never have imagined that,” says Phyllis Jackson, P&G’s vice president of consumer market knowledge for North America. “I don’t think we’ve typically thought about America as a country with big income gaps to this extent.”

The new numbers from the Census Bureau peg 2010′s Gini coefficient at 0.469, which, statistically speaking, doesn’t represent a significant change in income inequality as compared to 2009. However, the Bureau notes, “changes in shares of aggregate household income by quintiles showed a slight shift to more inequality.” So the basic trend is still depressingly in place.

It’s not hard to understand what is happening here. The middle class, squeezed by globalization and advances in technology, is sinking backward, while the rich benefit disproportionately from gains in trade and excessively accommodative tax policy. Politically speaking, the obvious prescription would be to raise taxes on the rich and create jobs for the middle class. Unfortunately, the current Republican Party seems to think that the income demographics of the Philippines are something to be aspired to, instead of fixed.

Many observers have been predicting this end game since the beginning of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, if only because the austerity forced upon Greece by the terms of its bailout has so damaged the Greek economy as to make it impossible for the country to grow at all. But whatever might or might not happen to Greece has never been the primary cause for concern. European banks own lots and lots of Greek debt. What happens to those banks when Greece defaults?

Systemic crisis, anyone? As Spiegel observes, “As the financial crisis showed, banks are deeply interconnected across national borders. If one major bank fails, others can easily be dragged down with it.”

And that of course, was the rationale for bailing out institutions like Bank of America and Citigroup, rather than forcing them into some kind of managed bankruptcy. Now it looks more and more like the world will get a chance to find out what happens when governments decide that they won’t (or can’t) bail out the bad apples.

The consensus view of Europe’s policymakers, as summarized by Spiegel, seems to be that Greece is a basket case that can’t be saved, but that the Greek contagion won’t spread to other sickly eurozone countries. That sounds an awful lot to me like Hank Paulson or Ben Bernanke’s assertions that the subprime mortgage housing woes were “contained.” The big risk of course, is that Greece turns out to be like Lehman Brothers, and a default there leads to meltdown more broadly.

Felix Salmon captures the moment:

“We’re at an inflection point, in Europe, and all the signs are pointing to more chaos and uncertainty. The last crisis brought Europe and the world together, at least briefly. This one is tearing Europe apart.”

FDR’s New Deal remains the standard by which all Democratic presidents are judged. The government put millions of Americans directly to work building roads and bridges and schools that still exist today. The creation of Social Security established the underpinnings of a safety net for all Americans. Wall Street’s tendency to excess and destructive speculation was reined in by the Securities Exchange Act and the banking system stabilized for generations by federal deposit insurance.

Meanwhile, Obama struggles merely to get unemployment insurance extended. Should we blame his failings as a politician, or Republicans for their obstruction, or is America simply a different country now than it was 80 years ago? The economy is still in crisis, but the efficacy of government action has been so clamorously called into question by the Tea Party and congressional Republicans — with Texas Gov. Rick Perry even claiming that the New Deal was a failure and Roosevelt made the Great Depression worse — that the notion of a new New Deal seems further away than ever.

Michael Hiltzik, a Los Angeles Times columnist and the author of several works of popular history, gets credit for hitting the timing jackpot. Just as President Obama is once again attempting to make the case for government action, Hiltzik’s latest book, “The New Deal: A Modern History,” is arriving in bookstores. Hiltzik spoke with Salon to explain why we should reexamine FDR’s legislative achievements, and what Obama could learn from them.

The New Deal isn’t exactly what one would call an underappreciated period of history. What made you decide to revisit it?

I think we have a very distorted and incomplete view today of the New Deal. The last spate of books about it were either overly polemical and ideological, like Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man,” or they were incomplete, like Jonathan Alter’s recent book “The Hundred Days.” So I thought it was time to go back and rediscover it and recapture what really happened, so that we could reset the debate that we were inevitably going to have now about the New Deal, by showing what gave rise to it, what was good about it and what was bad about it.

Were you consciously influenced by the Great Recession and the example of a new Democratic president coming in at a time of crisis?

Well, that aspect of it emerged as I started working on it. The debate about the New Deal is a permanent debate. As we approached the presidential election and then the reelection, I thought it was clear that this whole question of what is the federal government’s role in our lives was going to move front and center. That sort of fed into my conviction that this was the right thing to do.

So what have we gotten wrong? How have we misunderstood the New Deal?

Both sides get the New Deal wrong. The New Deal has become a shibboleth for both liberals and for conservatives. Conservatives look at it as the quintessential radical socialist over-reaching. There’s this idea that Roosevelt was a central radical figure and the New Deal sprung from his head. It was a plan, and it was all about him collecting power — the Imperial Presidency — and foisting this radical expansion of government on the American people. But that is simply not true.

Roosevelt was a much more conservative leader than that narrative gives him credit for. In fact, at least until 1937, inflationary and deflationary government policies were actually very balanced — too well balanced, in fact. There wasn’t enough Keynesian-style stimulus until 1938.

And what liberals and progressives get wrong is the mirror image of that. They view the New Deal as this ideal of progressive liberal government action — the essence of Keynesian deficit spending policy. For that camp Roosevelt becomes the hero, the progressive hero. But that gives too much credit to the idea that this was a program, a single program in which everything was designed to work together like a machine. And that simply was demonstrably untrue. It was much messier than that.

The New Deal was a combination of conservative initiatives and progressive initiatives, and there was a lot that Roosevelt had nothing to do with — or actively disapproved of. Things like deposit insurance, for example. Roosevelt, like Wall Street, was really negative about that and threatened to veto the Emergency Banking Act during the hundred days if it was in there. But he was just finally told, it’s going in — you are going to have to accept it. And of course it ended up protecting the money supply and protecting the banking industry.

He was also really equivocal about Social Security. He was always very wary of anything that looked like the dole, or an excessive redistribution of wealth. Just a month before the Social Security Act was due to be presented to Congress, he said I’m not sure the time is right for a retirement program.

Reading your book, one of the things that struck me most about the difference between what Roosevelt faced and what Obama has faced had to do with how willing Congress was to pass everything Roosevelt sent them — with huge majorities of both parties. The Emergency Banking Act took about seven hours to become law! Why was Congress so eager to give him what he wanted?

The Depression was much, much worse then than what we have lived through over the last few years. It had gone on for much longer. Every effort to deal with it had sort of been tried and had failed. There was a lot more fear among the public and Congress about not achieving what had to be done.

But opposition to what Roosevelt was doing began to emerge fairly quick — certainly by the end of 1933 when the Securities Exchange Act bill came up. Wall Street was out there fighting it tooth and nail, and did get changes in it. In fact progressives thought at the time that Roosevelt had completely sold out to Wall Street on the SEC bill.

But the two parties were also very different then from what they are today. Today, each party, particularly the Republicans, are ideologically homogeneous. Back then they were very heterogeneous — you had progressive and conservative camps in both parties. The core of opposition to the New Deal was actually a really powerful conservative wing among Southern Democratic senators. Roosevelt had to triangulate even within his own party, and he was very canny about doing that but took a lot of criticism from progressives for selling out. As I was researching that and putting those sections of the book together it gave me a different perspective on Obama’s relations with Congress and also with progressives.

How so?

Progressives have to understand that it is not unnatural for a president to compromise to get what he can get. You can debate whether Obama compromises too much or not enough or whether he gives in too easily. But the same debate went on with Roosevelt, the leader who is held up today as this master of manipulative politics — the genius of progressivism.

And yet, even after the business community turned against him, Roosevelt’s personal popularity didn’t take a hit. He expanded his majorities in the midterm election of 1934 and won a landslide in 1936, even while the economy was still in terrible shape. What explains his popularity?

One part of it was his personality. Roosevelt was just an extraordinary politician. When he did his Fireside Chats he had a feel for language that would be comforting and clear and lucid. He had an amazing ability to explain what he was about to do. And in this environment, where people were so afraid, when they had lived through this Depression which had been so severe and had gone on so for long, they were much more willing to give him what he wanted, to give him their assent. And that contributed to his personal popularity. But he just had this manner that people found very appealing. He had a skill that’s unusual if not unique. You can’t really blame Obama for not having that, he’s just a different personality

You write near the end of your book that “the New Deal instilled in Americans an unshakable faith that their government stands ready to succor them in times of need.” Does that really hold true? Rick Perry might be the next president of the United States and he’s calling Social Security a “Ponzi scam.” The current Republican Party is absolutely dedicated to shrinking government. The general public seems to have given up on the notion that government can help.

The persistence of bad conditions has shaken people’s faith. But when you really look at opinion polls, and what people think, even among the Tea Party … they don’t want Social Security cut, they don’t want Medicare cut. To the extent to which Social Security has been expanded by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, there is this core sense that this is the proper work of government: to provide a safety net.

You even have people like Karl Rove saying if Rick Perry continues down this road, he’s going to hurt the Republican Party because the American public doesn’t really feel that way. They don’t agree it is “a monstrous lie.”

We’ll know more next year, obviously. But for now I think these programs are really part of the American fabric and we have the New Deal to thank for that.

If you go back in time and advise Obama, right after his inauguration, on how to govern, based on what you’ve learned researching the New Deal, what would you tell him?

Well, I think the lesson to learn from Roosevelt is that Roosevelt always tried to make sure that the voters at large understood where the dividing line between their interests and the interests of other interests was. He was never shy about saying the government is here to protect you from some of your fellow Americans, who only want to take from you. Roosevelt again and again said the privileged classes are not your friends, they don’t reflect your interests but we do.

He positioned himself as the leader of the government whose job was to make sure people had a roof over their heads and food to eat and he would do his best to get them jobs and work and a paycheck. And Roosevelt always stood up for the principle of government action. The one unifying theme of the New Deal is that government has a role to play in people’s lives beyond national security. In one of his later fireside chats from 1937, he said that he didn’t agree with the notion that legislators should stay home. In a democracy, democratic action can never be an intruder; it’s always part of the process and needs to be defended.