Obama: the Ben Affleck of politics.

Opinions obviously vary, but I suspect the president and his team believed common sense would prevail, and perhaps that political norms really did shift in November.

Unfortunately, we still have the same media. Hopefully its clownish performance in the early weeks of Obama's presidency -- when even freakin' NPR puts on mostly Republicans to kvetch about minutiae and confidently declare economic policies with a record of nothing but fail -- will help put to rest the myth of the "liberal media."

There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

This has got to be one of the single dumbest things I have ever read. It's one thing to say less than 1% is in dispute. It's quite another thing to say it's just too big to look at carefully.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition either

Obama said in his inaugural, your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you can destroy. I'm guessing Tomas de Torquemada and the Republican party would disagree.

....and confidently declare economic policies with a record of nothing but fail

There are two sides to every story, even when there aren't.

Now you don't have to go to J-school. I've just saved you thousands compared to the cost of a Communications BA.

Hope you're grateful.

Obama needs to make it very clear that, ultimately, the federal government is going to have to pay for the fallout from Wall Street's mess. That payment can be in the form of good jobs, shoring up infrastructure and public transit, easier access to higher education, and various other programs beneficial to the middle class; or it can be in the form of endless extensions of unemployment benefits, food stamps, medicaid payments, and the formation of homeless shelters.
Any democrat in the senate or house who fails to fall into line, needs to be informed that they are on their own. No more financial support from the dem machine. Sen. Judd needs to be cut loose also. If the stimulus package doesn't pass, the commerce secretary position probably won't be a pressing concern for the country. The Obama team has miscalculated the mood in the country. Most of us are tired of being held hostage by these people and are really angry and frustrated.

Apparently, the guy has to do everything. Dems in the House and Senate have allowed Republicans to grab the spotlight, change the subject and misdirect the debate.

President Obama should take a page out of Bush's playbook; fire up Air Force One and take his show on the road. Start with Kentucky (McConnell) and Ohio (Boehner).

The White House, it seems, is finally getting in the game.

Hallelujah, thine the glory!!

Does this situation remind anyone else of what happened when Clinton attempted health care reform? framing, the gist of which was that 'there is no health care crisis'.

And people ultimately bought it. I really am hoping that someone can grow a pair and not let that happen again.

Boy this is really it. I never thought I'd actually see a fall of the Roman empire style decline in my lifetime but that's what were facing here. The republican party has gone stark raving fiddling while america burns style mad. The latest is the completely absurd amendment to the stimulus package sponsored by resident dimwit republican senator Isakson of Georgia. It gives a $15,000 tax break to homebuyers.
It's as if he and the rest of the senate never finished third grade math.5,000,000 homebuyers per year times $15,000 =75,000,000,000. That's seventy-five billion.

I'm glad to see President Obama directly confronting the "more tax cuts will fix everything" lies. These charlatans need to be called out and their failed ideology tied clearly to the financial wreckage they have already created.

This week was a freakin' disaster for Obama because he failed to recognize two obvious things: you drive your message home over and over again, and any act of kindness toward the GOP will go unrewarded. Those guys are pitbulls, you try to pet them and they'll gladly bite your hand off.

Fuck bipartisanship.

"This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply."

Sadly, this was just what "Hank" Paulson was telling everyone last fall. It's too bad that the Bush Republicans have cried "wolf!" too often, and so the new Democratic administration gets the blame and the skepticism.

Now, all the Republicans need to do is prevent President Obama from being able to rack up any successes that would start to rebuild the credibility of the White House. If "your people will judge you by what you build, not what you destroy" is the criterion, few if any will notice what Repubs in Washington "destroyed"; they'll notice that the Dems failed to build anything.

The White House, it seems, is finally getting in the game.

Let's do a little deconstructing, shall we?

DougJ: "No one expects an assault on common sense."

C'mon, this is fucking ridiculous. The last eight years have been nothing but an assault on common sense.

Steve Benen: "I suspect the president and his team believed common sense would prevail, and perhaps that political norms really did shift in November."

Fair enough. Then he made a BIG MISTAKE. He didn't and doesn't have some secret plan that we all don't know about, as many have been suggesting. No brilliant chess move that leads to Nirvana.

Steve Benen again: "The White House, it seems, is finally getting in the game."

NO, NO, NO. More is needed than just "getting in the game." There needs to be a fundamental SHIFT IN TONE and STRATEGY in light of the MISTAKE that has been made. More bipartisan bullshit and whining will not suffice.

While I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that this was all part of the plan--I do believe that President(!) Obama expected rationality to win the day--for passing the rescue bill, there is an advantage to giving the GOP enough rope to hang themselves. We've been "debating" this since before the year began, and we've yet to hear about all these "new ideas" the GOP keeps talking about having (let alone sensible old ideas).

When people (read:MSM) start glomming on to the fact that for every new niggling GOP objection (which would, if accommodated, not entice them to support the bill anyway) simply leads to another niggling objection, with no solutions forthcoming, the GOP will have done all the heavy lifting themselves, without the need for 'partisan' confrontation at the outset.

Might I suggest a strategy.
Turn the states against these republican congress ass clowns. Get the governors (even willing republican governors) together with top economics advisers and VERY publicly start hammering the immediate need for this stimulus package. The new meme should be: The ground commanders (aka people on the state level) against these out of touch feds/republicans.

In a way, it's fine that we've focused, albeit somewhat foolishly, on the drivel that the GOP has been spewing and pontificating of late.

It's as if playing a song over and over will make it
better.

The reality is far graver than the inconsequential squawks that we've had to listen to.

I think most people realize this.

The GOP is the divisive entity.

Obama's administration seeks not just "come-togetherness", but also, "let's get 'r dun!"

The time has surely passed when we can put aside the things that must be done.

Holding up the stimulus package over 1% is beyond

intellectual discourse. It's insane.

Yeah, it has been strange watching the new team begin the game with a "Prevent Defense". Waiting for Mitch's Peiper Panzers to run out of gas won't work.

Dems in the House and Senate have allowed Republicans to grab the spotlight, change the subject and misdirect the debate.

Go figure, the Dem leadership in Congress is completely worthless. Can anyone cite one example where Harry Reid has shown strength and leadership on any significant issue? I'm a little more surprised we haven't heard more from Nancy Pelosi, since she's been the Repubs favorite target lately--it doesn't take a whole lot to rebut their bs.
As for Obama's grand scheme and chess playing--it didn't exist. He got caught flat-footed and maybe didn't think that the other Dems would abandon the battlefield. He also misjudged his ability to create some big bi-partisan consensus with the remaining Repubs in Congress who are mostly on the far right wing and who will oppose almost every spending/stimulus package--now, and every time in the future. Obama needs to stop wasting the top-shelf White House booze on these guys. Work with your big Dem majority and whatever moderate Republicans are left.

Why do I have to watch C-Span to find a Dem Senator defending and articulating the need for the S-Bill. Dodd and McCaskill were pretty good in punching the Republicans in the nose. Why aren't they on CNN?

“Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate minority leader, hinted Wednesday that Obama has lost control of his own Congress�.

On the contrary, my respect for Obama and his control of Congress has improved. Obama has flushed out a significant flaw in the Republican Party. For me it has not only shown a huge flaw in the Republican practice of cutting taxes it has shown these results of trickle down economics is not working. The rich are actually chocking the economy. This down ward spiral that the American economy is moving towards is close to neutral, falling with no brakes.

Obama exclaiming that the rules have changed when business decides to take money from the electorate through Congress or the Federal Reserve is only natural. Heck when you sit to get a loan from a bank there piles of documents to sign that stipulate more rules and guidelines then we the people understand and finally realize. But when the electorate is loaning the money oh my there should be no restrictions and the electorate doesn’t even need to know what is done with the money. That is crazy.

Now when money is loaned to business the electorate does and should have a right to set guidelines in business. Or let those failing business go into a dysfunctional pirate infested free market with no regulations but keenly tracked by a politically corrupt IRS.

For me this is what Obama has flushed out. Well gosh; please your going to tell me that politicians like Senator Daschle are not tracked for taxes all the time. Yet let the problem string out for several years like five whole years before a resolution. There is something wrong here. Especially when it is nomination time. This thing called vetting via the IRS needs to be addressed debated and opened up in the public in language that is understandable not coded or matrixed to hide stuff.

Chuck Todd said a funny thing relating some of the challenges and examples of the debates or Congressional fighting as “Political guerrilla war fair�. Then Joe Scare making an argument that News Papers should charge for their Internet stuff because they use advertising income to survive all which had something to do with the kids in America being able to learn…Then the scar said screw the kids. Nice guy huh?

The former CEO was on MSNBC here one could understand why he thinks this new wave of thinking, were the electorate is making some guidelines like simply asking pay back that is loaned form the electorate tax is a way of be retaliatory. Ladies and Gentlemen for almost a century our government has just “GIVEN� money with out pay back. Other business types do span the industries in cludeing the arts we call comedy shows and public radio movie makers and such but they seem with audacity just joke around. Free speech in serious news has ruptured into excellence of bloated bias and comedy hour analysis mixed with the wrong proportions as in the Limbaugh brew.

Agreed with Econobuzz. No one with a functioning brain who has paid any attention to American politics since 1994 can possibly believe that common sense will prevail. Force and intensity will prevail. Obama needs to put together a properly designed trillion dollar package and use the budget process to ram it down the Republicans' throats. That is the only way to get this done.

Obama can either cooperate with the Republicans or he can have a successful presidency. It was a mistake to talk to the Republicans at all. He has wasted valuable time and if the bill passes in its current form it will not get the job done.

Someone suggested the other day that stimulus spending should be concentrated most on states whose national representatives vote for it. That sounds to me like a suitable incentive.

Chill people. Hopefully, Obama is trying to build for the long run. That means that short term there will be bumps and compromises. Please don't be like Wall Street and insist on immediate gains that you can cash in. Sacrifice now. Make an investment. Change takes patience and persistence.

I think a lot of Americans were just assuming the economic stimulus bill would pass. I know that was the case with my family and they didn't start calling their Congress critters until yesterday when I told them it was in trouble and they needed to call.

I can't blame them either. They're too busy worrying about their jobs to be fully on top of things right now. They were counting on economic sense prevailing, because THIS IS ONE OF THE GREATEST ECONOMIC CRISES SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Seriously, it's all cats and dogs living together and mass hysteria out in the real world and the Republicans are in some magical land of unicorns, gumdrops, and capital gains tax cuts. As my brother said to me the other day, "I just noticed, the Republicans are insane."

And so is the media. They're not losing their jobs. I turned on the TV yesterday and it was all about how the Obama administration is over and how his poll numbers are "tanking," and ridiculous things like that. Today, after the jobless numbers came out, the tone of the reporting was completely different.

So no, I can't blame Obama, because it's hard to really appreciate just how intellectually and morally bankrupt the Republicans are. He can't believe they want the country to fail. But they do. Either that or they just don't care.

Obama's biggest mistake so far is saying to Eric Cantor, "I won". Republicans got bitch-slapped by the "uppity Magic Negro" and now they're unified - by hatred of course but still, whatever works.

The mistake he made with progressives is that he made a fucking mistake. Some are already erecting a cross.

It's a Disaster! It's Horrible! The Conservatives are coming back into control of the Government after eight and more years of proven incompetence!! Two weeks into office and Obama has lost control of his Presidency and the government!!!

Or at least that's the conclusion that a lot of people seem to be jumping to, based on the ignorant froth and ranting in the political media.

It seems to me that I recall one or maybe two occasions during Obama's campaign for President when they lost a week or so in the media and everyone was screaming that it was a disaster. Then for no reason that was obvious in the media, the situation was turned around. Obama was a real long shot, but he won.

I think that the Obama campaign specifically eschewed the use of the Bill Clinton-style media-focused warroom rapid response operation in favor of deeper understanding and control of the problem. They were using different, none media-centered levers to manipulate public opinion. And somehow the Obama campaign then seemed to almost effortlessly to turn such "disasters" around.

The same small group of people is still running the Obama operation. They didn't miss much. When they did, they quickly adjusted their focus. And since they operated below the media radar, their opponents did not know what was happening to them and found it difficult to prepare a defense.

Many of the same otherwise sensible anti-conservatives were reacting to the Obama "disasters" during the campaign much as they are reacting to this situation, with much noise, anguish and wringing of hands. Remember when McCain had his Palin-bounce after the Republican convention?

These Obama guys didn't expose their strategy in public to the media. (Or if they did, the media never figured it out. Either way, they didn't see it. Why should that change now? When was the last time a media-generated flap like this one was anything more than the result of the fevered imaginations of people looking for something to write or broadcast about to fill a news hole or empty airtime? I don't think the public is being influenced my the media nearly as much as the media is feeding the public what they want to hear so they can get ratings/advertising revenues. The public is already quite set in its opinions and demands. The Obama camp is trying to change those basic public opinions, and they in the past seem to have learned how to actually get what they want in spite of the media.

I don't think those of us who try to keep informed will have a clue what is really going on until after it has happened. No amount of screaming, wailing, shrieking and rending-of-clothes will make a difference. But the same is true for the conservatives.

The conservatives, now, are (probably) badly misreading the situation. They think (as do the writers of the articles Steve is responding to and as do much of the rest of the political media) that they really do think they have caught up with the Obama juggernaut. That's certainly the talk show conceit. But if the pattern holds true, at some time soon the obstructionists will suddenly find that the situation has changed and they have been outflanked. They, along with the rest of us, will not know in advance how or when.

I suspect that we need to learn more patience. I have little doubt that Mitch McConnell and his compatriots are going to learn a touch of humility - to the extent that they are capable of learning anything. Rush and most of his ilk never will.

I'm a little more surprised we haven't heard more from Nancy Pelosi, since she's been the Repubs favorite target lately--it doesn't take a whole lot to rebut their bs.

Pelosi got her job done -- the bill passed the House.

That's what a lot of people on both sides seem to be forgetting: THE STIMULUS BILL PASSED THE HOUSE. It didn't "lose" even though all the Republicans voted against it -- it PASSED. FFS.

And yet Republicans and the media have been talking for days about how great it was that the Republicans stuck together in defeat. I think at least a few in the media don't even realize the bill passed and the Republicans didn't win a goddamned thing.

Mnemosyne has a good -- and overlooked -- point.

"I suspect the president and his team believed common sense would prevail, and perhaps that political norms really did shift in November."

Good god, I hope you're wrong. Remember how "everything changed after 9/11," how our national discourse and the press's coverage of it would became more serious, how we would have no more media circuses like that surrounding Gary Condit? How'd that work out?

I really hope that Obama and his staff are smart enough to realize that if 9/11 couldn't change things a mere election certainly wouldn't.

He who controls the message wins. He who manipulates the credulous, brain dead, supine, corporate dominated, lazy, media best wins. I thought Obama knew that. Evidently not.

It's only been two weeks, but the Obama administration already feels old. Some honeymoon. Get with the program Barack, the game is double hardball, and you've got all the balls if you choose to use them. Start kicking some ass. There is no bipartisanship with the Rethugs. They want you to fail, they don't give a shit about the country. They only care about themselves and power. Do what Bush did: IGNORE THEM! Treat them as if they aren't there. Stop appointing them to your cabinet. Make deals with the few that have a brain. Punish, punish, PUNISH those who won't get onboard with your program, and start dismantling the right wing noise machine. NPR, for example.

The fiasco this week has left me with stomach cramps. Watching the spineless Congressional Dems trip over themselves, yet again, to appease THE GUYS WHO LOST BIG TIME, and hanging THEIR president out to dry.

Obama appears to have suffered from the illusion that the Republicans, given their recent electoral implosion, might be interested to move a little to the center in order to get themselves out of the hole they and Bush have dug for themselves.

He certainly also understands that the country is facing an extremely grave and unprecedented economic situation for which there are no patented solutions. So he attempted to build as wide as possible a consensus on how to tackle that problem and made the Republicans an offer. What he is getting from the Republicans however, is their usual game.

Obama is a pretty smart fellow. His actions over the last day indicate that he has drawn the right conclusions on the response of the Republicans: He will have to do this without them.

What one has to wonder though, is what the prize for the Republicans will be. They are pursuing a high risk strategy here. Obama is pretty PR savy and if he can successfully make the argument that the Republicans are fooling around while the country slides into an econcomic calamity, they may well find out by 2010 that they can go lower than 178 in the House and 41 in the Senate,

Obama and Co. have had their head in the sand the last 16 years if they thought anything approaching common sense would prevail among the republicans. The republicans have one thing and one thing only on their minds and that is power. He's going to have to rassle it from them if he wants his agenda to prevail, to hell with common ground...there isn't any.

SRW1's final comment is a good one. The Republican's seem to be going all in on obstructing the President, whether because they really believe that they have the right solution and he doesn't or because they want the Democratic President (and, incidently, the American economy) to fail. If, heaven forbid, Obama succeeds and the economy recovers, this just might be a party killer.