It’s hardly a surprise, but still it’s impressive how quickly media narratives of the debate over the Obama stimulus package have been slipping into the familiar grooves of the “Democrats In Disarray” story-line. Bill Scher at the Our Future blog has the appropriate response:

Crossfire from his own party! Key Democrats blast Obama stimulus plan! Political wrangling bogs down economic stimulus plan! At odds! Doubts arise!
Such is the traditional media interpretation of the policy deliberations going on between the incoming Obama administration and members of Congress.
But read deeper into the stories and you don’t find evidence of explosive hostility or deep conflict. There is civil debate and discussion, not “crossfire.” There is desire to modify aspects of Obama’s plan, but not its overarching thrust. Congress is still expected to pass legislation within a month of Obama’s swearing-in, which is not exactly getting bogged down, but moving pretty swiftly.

As Scher suggests, there’s a unwholesome taste for authoritarianism that’s implicit in media treatment of intra-party debate as unnatural :

Instead of one-party rule undermining checks and balances and stifling discussion, we may well be seeing how — when a progressive mandate for action points everyone in the right direction — a President, a Congress and their constituents can engage in calm debate to refine proposals while still acting in timely fashion.

Yes, it’s been a long time since either of the two major political parties was able to resolve disagreements without fearing the appearance of weakness. But just as there’s no time right now for genuine disarray among Democrats, there’s no time for prevarication or artificially imposed uniformity over the differences of opinion that actually exist. We’ll get over it.

Daniel Libit at Politico has a summary today of five Senate confirmation controversies he thinks Team Obama will soon encounter.
I think one of these supposedly imminent “collisions”–Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry versus Secretary of State-designee Hillary Clinton–is pretty much a contrived fiction. Sure, Kerry and Clinton have been rivals, and sure, they probably on a private level hold each other in minimum high regard. But Kerry’s been a staunch Obama ally, and there’s just no way he will try to throw a monkey wrench into the most important Obama foreign policy appointment. It’s not like the two Democratic titans have a whole lot of substantive disagreements, either.
That may also be the case with a second “collision” Libit discusses, Leon Panetta’s appointment as CIA director. Now that Diane Feinstein has made her point about not being consulted in advance, and secured an apology from none other than vice president-elect Joe Biden, I’d be surprised if she makes too many waves about fellow-Californian Panetta. Yes, they’ve had issues in the past, but again, as with Kerry and Clinton, these folks are politicians who are used to gritting their teeth and saying nice things about each other that may not be entirely sincere.
The three real “fireworks” confirmation hearings are likely to be those involving AG-designee Eric Holder, Energy Secretary-designee Steven Chu, and Treasury Secretary-designee Tim Geithner. As Libit notes, Chu’s problem is with Kentucky senator Jim Bunning, who will make a big deal out of Chu’s past comments about coal. But Chu’s actual confirmation isn’t in question. Geithner’s hearing is potentially a bigger concern because it is likely to serve as the lightning rod for Republican and perhaps even some Democratic unhappiness with the financial industry bailout, future regulatory plans, and the Obama stimulus proposal. Finance Committee ranking Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa could make this something of a show trial.
But as has been the case all along, the only confirmation that could theoretically be in trouble is that of Holder. There’s no question that the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter of PA, who faces a potential conservative primary challenge next year, will be loaded for bear, particularly in terms of Holder’s role in last-minute Clinton administration pardons. And there’s enough Democratic heartburn over that incident to provide some fodder for a fire, though probably not enough for a conflagration.

There are a couple of new “looks” at president-elect Barack Obama out today that deserve notice. One, by Mike Tomasky in The Guardian, coins an interesting new phrase for Obama’s approach to the stimulus package: “indirect direction:”

He has shown time and again that unique skill of being able to guide people toward his desired conclusion with what I will call indirect direction. When the issue was his race, his name, his religion, his inexperience or what have you, he rarely (except in the big “race speech”) tried to assuage voters by addressing these points directly. After the financial crisis hit in mid-September, for example, he rarely said, “Yes, I can handle this, and here’s why.” He laid out a few proposals, let his superior debate performances speak for themselves – and let the public watch John McCain flail. The voters reached his desired conclusion (that he was better prepared to handle the crisis) without his having to write it across the sky in letters.

In this take, Obama is not only okay about, but is actively relying on criticism of his stimulus proposal, particularly from progressives, to shape it in the direction he ultimately favors.
Meanwhile, over at New York magazine, John Heilemann takes everything ever said about Obama’s unique political appeal and ramps it up many notches in a piece that suggests he’s the first “Independent” president. The nugget of hard news in Heilemann’s analysis is his report that Obama’s decided to turn his political network over to the DNC:

Now, having dragged electioneering kicking and screaming into the new century, Obama and his people are grappling with how to harness their network to help Obama govern. Virtually since Election Day, they have been debating the putative shape of what they like to call Obama for America 2.0, with much of the focus on a central choice: Should the network be folded into the DNC or housed within an independent entity? The risk for Obama in pursuing the former path was clear: a possible turnoff for the millions of loyalists who bought into the Obama brand but happened not to be Democrats. On the other hand, though an outside group would have given Obama a power base separate from the DNC, he would also have been less able to exercise control over its agenda.
With the selection last week of Obama’s friend, Virginia governor Tim Kaine, to chair the party, the question has more or less been answered: Much of the campaign’s grassroots operation, I’m told, will reside at the DNC. What Obama is wagering is that, with some clever branding (read camouflage), the fealty of his non-Democratic followers to him personally will overcome whatever nausea they experience owing to the partisan affiliation. And though the move has been interpreted as a sign of Obama’s empowering the DNC by having it absorb the network, I suspect that the opposite may happen. The Obama network—with its greater resources and zeal—may effectively absorb the party.

We’ll see if Heilemann’s right about that before long, but it’s fascinating that there remain so many very different takes about Barack Obama’s basic approach to politics after so very much scrutiny.

Take a quick peek at this “YouthMap2008” at Flckr.com. It’s a sort of “Wild in the Streets” vision of the future for Republicans, given the Dems’ bright prospects for retaining young voters, especially considering our edge in leveraging the latest tools for political organizing of youth. What is particularly interesting here, however, is the morph to blue of southern red states, SC, TN, AL, MS and even, gasp, TX.

Here’s the just-released report, “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” by Christina Romer, Obama’s nominee-designate for chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and economist Jared Bernstein, office of the Vice President-elect.
The American Prospect‘s Tim Fernholz has some insightful comments in his Tapped post on the Romer-Bernstein report.
The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn posts on the concerns of Paul Krugman , James K. Galbraith and Lawrence Summers that the package is too small, while John B. Judis calls for more investment in high-speed rail and international monetary system reform, also in TNR.
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com mulls over the multiplier effect of 1 percent permanent hikes in tax cuts vs. government spending in Obama’s stimulus package, and makes the case for “maximizing the $500b number as opposed to minimizing the $300b number; the scent of $300b is something that seems to have thrown both sides off the trail.”
The Boston Globe‘s Scott Lehigh argues against the provision for permanent tax cuts in the Obama plan, and The Grey Lady has an editorial making the same point.
Hotline‘s Matthew Gottlieb comments on the differing results in the AllState/Politico poll and the latest Gallup poll regarding public opinion toward Obama’s stimulus plan.
For a perceptive look at the Republican propaganda campaign against the Obama stimulus package, read Sara Robinson’s Alternet (via Campaign for America’s Future) post “10 Absurd Conservative Myths About Obama’s Recovery Plan.”
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich weighs in in his blog on the importance of job training to insure an adequate base of skilled workers to make the Obama stimulus package succeed, while Thomas L. Friedman worries in his New York Times column that, while Obama understands the pivotal importance of education, Congress may not yet get it that education is the key to the plan’s long-range success.

As intra–progressive arguments over Obama’s stimulus package continue to grow, there’s a simple but important distinction to keep in mind between the new administration’s economic and political strategies. One argument, which Paul Krugman has made in a nice but pointed way, is that even if Obama gets everything from Congress he is asking for, it may be too small and too poorly structured to turn the economy around. Another argument, which is popping up in too many places to cite, is about Obama’s language of bipartisanship and cooperation and openness to other points of view in getting his stimulus package enacted.
The first argument is crucial, and its answer obviously would have a big impact on the long-term political implications of the stimulus debate as well. But the second argument strikes me as the same argument many progressives have been having with Obama and his advisors from the moment he announced for president, and even earlier. They don’t like it when Obama “reaches out” to Republicans, or sounds too willing to compromise, or fails to draw early and clear lines in the sand. That’s a legitimate point of view. But it should no longer be surprising when he operates in this way.
It should be abundantly clear by now that rightly or wrongly, Team Obama simply doesn’t accept the fight-now-compromise-later, proud-progressive-partisan, maximalist approach to “change” that many progressives wish he would embrace. And in terms of where he stands today, Obama’s own approach–which I’ve tried to describe as “grassroots bipartisanship”–has worked out pretty well so far. Until it doesn’t, fears that he’s about to give away the store to, or get rolled by, the GOP, while perfectly understandable, ought to be expressed with a little less panic, and a lot less certainty.

Today, and probably for the next week or so, we’ll see flares sent up by various people in both political parties about the structure, size and details of President-elect Obama’s economic stimulus proposal.
Among Democrats, Obama’s economic team has already gotten an earful from Senate Democrats who appear concerned that too much in the way of tax cuts made it into the package. The highly influential Nobel Laureate economist/columnist Paul Krugman weighed in this morning with a formal complaint that the package isn’t large enough to turn the economy around.
Republicans, meanwhile, generally fall along the range that runs from those promosing visigothic assaults on anything Obama proposes, to those who will support tax cuts only, to those who are making conciliatory noises while laying down markers about the size or composition of the stimulus package that make cooperation unlikely.
In discussions with Senate Democrats, it appears, Team Obama stressed that the President-elect’s strongest constituency at present in taking the current approach happens to be the public. And the nature of that support makes White House-congressional negotiations over the stimulus package especially tricky. On the one hand, big majorities want to see action taken on a cooperative and “bipartisan” basis. On the other hand, neither party in Washington has anything like the credibility of Obama himself. And above all, anything that looks or smells like the September financial bailout will quickly get into trouble.
In terms of public perceptions, it probably wouldn’t hurt Obama to listen carefully to folks on the Hill and then ignore at least some of their advice. Republicans will almost certainly make that easy for him, eager as they are to find the moment when they can declare total war and try to turn back the clock to 1993. As for congressional Democrats, anything that looks like an effort to engage in wheeling and dealing will only be helpful to the extent that it gives Obama the opportunity to say no.
Maybe Paul Krugman is right that the whole exercise is too little, too late, to save the economy from a prolonged and very deep recession. I’m not an economist. But the one thing we do know is that public confidence is critical to both the economy itself, and to any steps taken to revive it. And that’s the resource Barack Obama must maintain through the tough days just ahead.

His was hardly a household name, and he never had a television show or a personal political machine like a lot of the Christian Right figures he inspired. But Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who died this morning, exerted an outsized influence on American conservatives, religious and secular. His 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, profoundly affected the very language of how people talked about church-state issues, and probably did more to undermine Protestant support for separation of church and state than any other corrosive force.
After his conversion to Catholicism in 1990, he became a bulwark of the traditionalist wing of his new church, and one of the leading architects of the evangelical-Catholic alliance on cultural issues like gay rights and abortion.
But the best progressive voice to hear about Neuhaus is Damon Linker, who once edited Neuhaus’ flagship magazine, First Things, before becoming one of his most effective critics. In his obituary at The New Republic today, Linker speaks of “the two Richard John Neuhauses,” one a kind man, a brilliant mentor, and a dedicated parish priest, and the other a political schemer and destructive force of a high order.
I briefly met the latter Neuhaus in the flesh during a Washington lecture at the height of the furor over his famous “End of Democracy” symposium at First Things, wherein he roiled conservative ranks by suggesting that judicial rulings on abortion and gay rights meant that Christians no longer owed obedience to “the current regime.” I’d have to say that during his remarks Neuhaus was the most chilling, even terrifying, speaker I’ve ever heard, in a sort of erudite Grand Inquisitor manner. And I’ve heard some scary people over the years.
I’ll take Linker’s word for it that the more irenic, and even self-restrained “first Richard John Neuhaus” began to reemerge in his later years, spurred perhaps by recognition of the fruits of his alliance with the Bush-Delay
Republican Party. Even as I hope the religio-political storms he conjured up finally subside, I hope he rests in peace.

President-elect Barack Obama’s speech this morning on the basic outlines of his economic stimulus package was a carefully crafted appeal that mildly but unmistakably laid out battlelines for the consideration of congressional Republicans who have been spoiling for a fight.
Stressing the urgency of action and the scope of the problem and the consequences of inaction, and bluntly asserting the central and indispensible role of government in the recovery, Obama’s speech anticipates every criticism he’s going to get from the Right: he’s moving too fast, he’s spending too much, he’s expanding government rather than putting money in the pockets of businesses and families, etc., etc.
On the scope of the crisis and the timing of action:

If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years. The unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. We could lose a generation of potential and promise, as more young Americans are forced to forgo dreams of college or the chance to train for the jobs of the future. And our nation could lose the competitive edge that has served as a foundation for our strength and standing in the world.
In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.

On the role of government:

It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy – where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending; where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit.

On budget deficits:

There is no doubt that the cost of this plan will be considerable. It will certainly add to the budget deficit in the short-term. But equally certain are the consequences of doing too little or nothing at all, for that will lead to an even greater deficit of jobs, incomes, and confidence in our economy….
We have to make tough choices and smart investments today so that as the economy recovers, the deficit starts to come down. We cannot have a solid recovery if our people and our businesses don’t have confidence that we’re getting our fiscal house in order. That’s why our goal is not to create a slew of new government programs, but a foundation for long-term economic growth.

On “unnecessary spending” or “make-work:”

It’s a plan that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment – the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work, even as, all around the country, there is so much work to be done. That’s why we’ll invest in priorities like energy and education; health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century. That’s why the overwhelming majority of the jobs created will be in the private sector, while our plan will save the public sector jobs of teachers, cops, firefighters and others who provide vital services.

And on the relationship of this package to past stimulus and “bailout” efforts:

I understand that some might be skeptical of this plan. Our government has already spent a good deal of money, but we haven’t yet seen that translate into more jobs or higher incomes or renewed confidence in our economy. That’s why the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan won’t just throw money at our problems – we’ll invest in what works. The true test of the policies we’ll pursue won’t be whether they’re Democratic or Republican ideas, but whether they create jobs, grow our economy, and put the American Dream within reach of the American people.
Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made transparently, and informed by independent experts wherever possible. Every American will be able to hold Washington accountable for these decisions by going online to see how and where their tax dollars are being spent

This last section represents a theme that will be very important in selling the stimulus package. Obama knows that the $700 billion bailout of the financial system in September, which he supported, remains unpopular, because no one really understands it, and because it did not tangibly benefit the middle class, even as it benefitted some of the very people and institutions that had failed the country. He’s moving now to distinguish this “Bush bailout” from his own efforts.
There’s also one theme that’s not in the speech which could well be significant. There’s no begging of Congress or of Republicans to come up with their own plans; no opening bid for compromise; no words of respect for the wisdom of senior figures in Washington. The only reference to “bipartisanship” is here:

That’s why I’m calling on all Americans – Democrats and Republicans – to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles; a sense of common purpose above the same narrow partisanship; and insist that the first question each of us asks isn’t “What’s good for me?” but “What’s good for the country my children will inherit?”

This is arguably the sort of “grassroots bipartisanship” aimed at generating public support that I’ve hypothesized as central to Obama’s politics, aimed at pressuring Congress to enact his own plan without large modifications.
And he’s off to a good start with the public:

By a large majority, voters favor President-elect Barack Obama’s wide-ranging policy prescriptions to aid the faltering economy, according to a new Politico/Allstate poll.
The survey of 1,007 registered voters conducted Dec. 27-29 showed that 79 percent of respondents favored Obama’s plan. The president-elect is advocating a $775 billion stimulus that includes a major investment in infrastructure projects and alternative energy as well as middle-class tax cuts, job training and health care reform.
Nearly 90 percent said they are either somewhat or very dissatisfied with the current state of the economy, and more than 60 percent said the country is heading down the wrong track. But while voters are cynical about the present, 56 percent expressed confidence that the economy will improve significantly in the next 12 months….
Obama’s favorability ratings remain high, with 63 percent of respondents holding a positive view of the president-elect and only 18 percent voicing a negative one.
Democrats in Congress, however, garnered positive ratings from just 41 percent of those surveyed, while their GOP counterparts registered only 24 percent. Meanwhile, large corporations rate positively among only 21 percent of voters, with 51 percent expressing negative feelings.

It appears that Obama and his advisors understand this climate of public opinion, and are determined not to let the stimulus package look like past bailouts, or consign it to the sovereign will of the congressional sausage factory.
And this initial sales pitch by Obama really does pose a direct challenge, even in the guise of an outstretched hand, to Republicans. They’ve spent much of the last two months convincing themselves that Obama, like Bill Clinton sixteen years ago, can be vanquished by a hard line against “government,” against “spending,” against cooperation, and against “Washington.” But Obama’s making every effort to identify “Washington” with the irresponsibility and ideological folly of the GOP itself, not by naming names, but by identifying the devil and letting Republicans put on their horns.

It was another fun day of intrigue on the campaign trail for the Republican National Committee chairmanship. A meeting of the RNC to hear candidates for the job debate turned into a private closed event because a quorum failed to show up.
But this probably happened because yesterday a meeting of a right-wing faction of the RNC, the Conservative Steering Committee, canceled a planned straw poll ranking the candidates for their fidelity to conservative litmus tests. According to the Washington Times (which should know), that happened because backers of Ken Blackwell (running as the To-the-Right-of-Jimmy-Dean-Sausage candidate) and Michael Steele (trying to avoid any setbacks) combined to kill the straw poll out of fear that incumbent chairman Mike Duncan would win it. Since the full RNC meeting today was intended to counteract the CSC straw poll, a lot of members probably saw no reason to show for a third consecutive day of candidate debates/inquisitions.
Busy, busy, busy. The main impact of this week’s extravaganza was to drive all the candidates to new heights of excess in foreswearing any intention of tolerating godless moderation in the GOP. And with no clear front-runner, they’ll have a couple more weeks to outdo each other and themselves even more.
NOTE TO READERS: TDS will return to a more intensive focus on developments within our own party tomorrow, after President-elect Obama’s long-awaited speech outlining his economic stimulus package. While awaiting it, though, conservative hijinks were just too tempting a target.
UDATE (the last, I promise!): One of the issues about Monday’s RNC candidate debate that went largely unnoticed was that a Republican Party supposedly determined to turn the page on the Bush-Delay Era allowed the very symbol of some of the worst aspects of that era, Grover Norquist, to call and moderate the debate. Ah, but I missed one dissent: from the conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, who did a post entitled “The GOP’s Grover Norquist Problem and the RNC Debate.” Could it be that Malkin would note the irony of the very father of the K Street Strategy, and the principal enthusiast for the deficit-celebrating Starve the Beast fiscal philosophy, presiding over deliberations of this supposedly cleancut, corporate-bailout-opposing, and fiscally righteous party?
Nope. Malkin’s complaints was this:

Some of us have not forgotten how Norquist made common cause with the left-wing zealots at People for the American Way in a forum bashing the Patriot Act — and how he forged even more dangerous alliances in the name of Muslim GOP outreach.

In the current atmosphere, Grover Norquist’s sin is that he’s not conservative enough. Gaze in awe.