Provincial Washington media misses real story of the stimulus bill

Obama is set to sign a massive stimulus bill Monday, which is a major accomplishment any President could be proud of. The fact that Obama got it through Congress only three weeks after he was inaugurated President is nothing short of Amazing. The media generally, however, wants to discuss only the fact that not a single House Republican and all but three Senate Republicans voted against the bill. Somehow the Washington, D.C. media has its priorities all screwed up. Their priority is not the economic disaster that is rapidly engulfing America and the world. Their priority is to report on the failed efforts of Obama, three weeks into his Presidency, to get the Republicans to vote for his bills.

Barack recognizes that even in the face of his stunning achievement of muscling the massive stimulus bill through the legislative meat-grinder and delay-machine we call Congress, he may have made some errors in how he spoke and set expectations inside the beltway.

From Steve Benen:

On Thursday night, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel suggested the White House had overdone their initial outreach to Republicans, telling reporters Obama's aides got "ahead of ourselves" when it came to striving for bipartisan comity.

Yesterday, White House staffers were signaling that they wouldn't repeat this in the future.

Advisers concluded that they allowed the measure of bipartisanship to be defined as winning Republican votes rather than bringing civility to the debate, distracting attention from what have otherwise been major legislative victories. Although Mr. Obama vowed to keep reaching out to Republicans, advisers now believe the environment will probably not change in coming months.

Rather than forging broad consensus with Republicans, the Obama advisers said they would have to narrow their ambitions and look for discrete areas where they might build temporary coalitions based on regional interests rather than party, as on energy legislation. They said they would also turn to Republican governors for support -- a tactic that showed promise during the debate over the economic package -- even if they found few Republican allies in Washington. [...]

Then Steve concludes:

I don't doubt that President Obama will continue to have a dialog with congressional Republicans. He'll keep them apprised of his intentions; he'll hear them out when they have complaints; and he'll maintain a respectful tone. But after the stimulus fight, the president, I suspect, has "learned a lesson" about how to engage a party that has philosophical, practical, and strategic goals that are wholly at odds with his own.

So essentially, the beltway media failed to generally get the real story and to put it into some perspective. [Not completely. The links from this article go to the Washington Post and the New York Times, but not many others followed their lead. That sure isn't where the TV so-called news out of D.C. went. They set the agenda for the national news (after they get it from Drudge.) This was largely a missed story.

Obama was not elected because he was going to draw the Republican Party into a large national unity in the face of the immediate and growing economic crisis. He was elected because he promised to deal with that crisis, and the Republicans for reasons of ideology and incompetence, refused to do so under George W. Bush.

Face it. Bush went on vacation for at least the last two months of his Presidency, delegating the economic crisis (which he has never understood, seemed to never take seriously, and clearly did not care about) to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his Treasury secretary Henry Paulson. Obama was elected to do what no one has ever successfully done before, alleviate and possibly reverse quickly the worst financial disaster to hit America since the Great Depression.

He promised to try also to raise the partisan tone of Washington, but except to Washingtonians and perhaps to those who want favors from powerful men in Washington, the partisan tone is a feature of the landscape in that city. That partisan tone is part of the nature of the Republican Party, and it is an essential part of their efforts to maintain and possibly regain power. They represent people who feel that the nation overall is going the wrong way, even now, and to expect them to somehow do that without personal animosity to those who stand in the way of their efforts to change the core nature of America is frankly unrealistic.

Barack seems to have realized that he cannot deal with the conservatives as a national group the same way as he did in the Senate with many of their representatives. OK. So he performed an amazing feat getting the stimulus bill through, and along the way he has learned that he has to change the way he manages the media narrative. That's the real story. For the first time since early 2007 when CountryWide announced that it was having an extremely high rate of mortgage defaults, the government has finally taken cognizance of the economic crisis and started to do something.

The passage of the stimulus bill and the events surrounding it seem to have come to a very good conclusion right now in the early days of the Obama administration, yet the media whines that the Republicans voted against it so somehow Obama has failed. You really have to wonder just how provincial the Washington, D.C media is to have so totally missed the main story here.