Quote Of The Day: Obama Let Guard Down And Is Losing Stimulus Fight To GOP

Our political Quote of the Day comes from Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. who details how President Barack Obama has begun quickly losing the stimulus fight to a defeated GOP:

The irony of President Barack Obama’s Blue Tuesday is that the wall-to-wall television interviews he granted were designed not to apologize for Tom Daschle’s fall from grace but to fight back against the Republicans’ success in tarnishing his stimulus package.

Obama’s network appearances were planned as a response to a wholly unanticipated development: Republicans — short on new ideas, low on votes, and deeply unpopular in the polls — have been winning the media wars over the president’s central initiative.

They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to “less than 1 percent of the overall package.” But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts.

Dionne, whose columns are must reads for moderate and centrists in particular, hits the nail on the head here:

For most of the debate, Obama has cast himself as a benevolent referee overseeing a sprawling and untidy legislative process to which he would eventually bring order. He urged Democrats to knock out small spending measures that had caused public relations problems while doing little to defend the overall package or to reply to its Republican critics.

In the meantime, those critics were relentless, often casting logic aside to reframe the debate from a practical concern over how to rescue the economy to an ideological dispute about government spending.

And, indeed, it’s fascinating to see how the early conventional wisdom has been tossed out the window.

When Obama was holding his meetings with GOPers, and hosting a friendly dinner for the man he defeated for the Presidency Arizona Senator John McCain, many analysts (including yours truly) either felt he was ushering in a new era (if they were independent writers or Democrats) or that the Republicans were being politically rolled (if they were Republican writers or talk show fans or hosts).

In retrospect, you have to now ask: who then let their guard down the most? It would appear that Obama was lulled by the inroads he made into getting a dialogue going with Republicans. He seemingly hasn’t responded in the stimulus debate as the powerful, new President who won by a healthy margin, but as more of a peacemaker sort of “tsk tsking” at the messiness of politics…with the assumption that his agenda would come out in the end. (So much for the McCain/Obama political lovefest..)

As an old journalism professor reminded me when I was a student at the Medill School of Journalism: “‘Assume’ makes an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’…” and Obama and his team probably feel a bit the epitome of the Democratic party’s symbol after reviewing the events of the past week.

Dionne concludes:

Its[the fate of the stimulus plan] hopes rest in part on a different form of bipartisanship. If Washington Republicans have decided to build a wall of opposition to the stimulus, Republican governors and mayors are eager for the money Obama wants to give them.

Thus will Obama and his allies be touting strong support for the stimulus from the Republican governors of California, Connecticut, Florida and Vermont. Mayors will be called upon to move House Republicans still open to persuasion.

In just two weeks, Obama and his advisers have been forced to learn basic lessons on the run. The elation of Inauguration Day has given way to a classic form of partisan hardball. The media cannot be counted on to be either liberal or permanently enchanted with any politician.

Arguments left unanswered can take hold, whether they make sense or not. And one more lesson: No occupant of the White House has ever been able to walk on water.

Team Obama has no excuse for what in retrospect (from the standpoint of them and their supporters) now seems like political negligence:

1. When Bill Clinton ran against George Bush his team created the “war room” SPECIFICALLY because they knew unanswered charges could take hold.

2. During the campaign team Obama made it clear that they were not going to fall into the trap of letting charges go unanswered because they could take hold.

Many of these arguments against the stimulus plan have come in the form of charges, in some cases initiated or repeated to the faithful on talk radio, then making their way into the mainstream media. With no strong answer (logical or not) they hang out there — and take hold and become…assumptions.

The question is whether Obama is a quick learner and will get it — or whether he’ll wind up like Jimmy Carter who never got it or Bill Clinton who didn’t seem to get it when he first got into office but seemed to get it…and in the end never got what he hoped to get in big ticket agenda items such as health care because he got it too late.

The big question now is…Obama:

Carter? Clinton? Or FDR-Reagan?