Smart take from Ron Brownstein on where we stand now after the stimulus has passed. I think it’s the right take.
Many on the left seem truly despairing after this week, feeling that Obama got rolled by the right on the stimulus and the Judd Gregg withdrawal, that Washington media is arrayed against them and that things are generally lousy. I think that’s unduly pessimistic. I’m persuaded by the economists who say that a bigger stimulus would have been better and I think the cuts imposed by the centrist gang were more nonsensical than not. Still…This is a $14 trillion economy and the differnece between a stimulus package in the $700 billion range and the $800 billion range is not going to be the determining factor in the fate of the republic. The fact is that Obama remains incredibly popular and he just passed as mammoth a rescue package as we’ve seen in generations. There are many reasons for despair at the moment but the events of this week, it seems to me anyway, are not really deserving of them.
I think Obama’s efforts at bipartisanship on the stimulus and in his cabinet appointments will work to his advantage in the long run. He’s not a sucker. The president knows that there will be occasions when he can pick up Republican votes and it wills erve him well.
I’m not sure I buy my colleague Josh’s assessment about Washington being arrayed against Obama. Obviously there are institutional impediments to change of any kind, whether it’s Reagan’s or Obama’s. Ours isn’t a system designed for dramatic shifts in power. But the White House was pleased with the way business lobbies supported the stimulus. K Street, far from being Tom DeLay’s pet, was more in the Democratic camp than not. It won’t always be so but to see the culture of lobbying as being irreversably and irrevocably opposed to Democratic or progressive goals is the stuff of lampoon and caricature. Does an on-one-hand-on-the-other media continue to turn out some lame copy about who’s at fault when the parties split? Sure, but so what? The important thing is not the atmosphere but the results.
I don’t underestimate what lies ahead but I’m pretty amazed by how despairing the tone on the left has been in the wake of what was a very significant passage of legislation.
