The Stimulus Bill and Obama's First Month in Office

Well, one major piece of legislation passed (to be signed into law on 2/17) in his first 30 days in office. Is it a masterpiece? Hardly. The Stimulus package is a compromise bill that started with Obama's ideas, got added to relentlessly by Nancy Pelosi's troops in the House, was re-focused by Obama as it went to the Senate and then trimmed and pulled a bit more toward tax relief by 3 very suddenly powerful moderate Republican Senators. Beyond the political tug of war, economists are all over the place on what should happen now anyway.

Will it work? Partially. Although almost all pork was removed from the nearly $800Billion bill, it still probably won't be enough to provide all the changes necessary to get the economy turned around. So that is what it isn't. However, it is an amazingly large law to be passed in a President's first month in office.

Zero Republicans voted for the Stimulus Bill in the House. 3 Republican Senators (Arlen Spector, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins) who won some concessions in the bill voted for the Senate version. Republican seem to be holding hands hoping that everything fails and then in the midterm elections they can say they had nothing to do with it. However, as pointed out today by Frank Rich in his Op-Ed piece in the New York Times:

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

Certainly Obama has had some stumbles on his nominees and this was not a smooth path to getting this first piece of legislation through. He has probably learned that Nancy Pelosi does not have much interest in bi-partisanship and he will have to be tougher with her behind the scenes. But despite what you read and hear from the media and Republicans on talk shows, polling shows that the American Public still has a very high approval rating for President Obama (over 60%) and the majority favored the Stimulus bill.

I don't think this was the way Obama wanted his first month to proceed, but he has learned some valuable lessons and if he continues to attack problems, the American people will probably stay on his side. Don't expect to hear him talk about bi-partisanship in the future. It might be more successful if it isn't made public. Most Republicans are playing their final trump card, hoping that things fail. If they don't and are on the wrong side of these bills, showing obstenance and resistance to work together, they will be an even smaller minority after the 2010 elections.