As recently as yesterday, we saw some positive news coming out of D.C. (A rare event of late and more than welcome.) It looked like there might be some bipartisan cooperation on jobs, an issue where the Obama administration is only about one year late coming to the party. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) had hammered out a bill which it seemed both sides might be able to live with. Hurray! But wait… not so fast.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led colleagues and the White House to believe he supported a bipartisan jobs bill — only to scuttle the plan as soon as it was released Thursday over concerns it could be used to batter Democratic incumbents, according to Senate sources.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) worked for weeks with Reid’s blessing and frequent involvement to craft an $85 billion jobs bill, a measure that seemed destined to break the partisan logjam that has ground the Senate to a halt.

But as Baucus, Grassley and President Barack Obama were preparing to celebrate a rare moment of bipartisan Kumbaya on Thursday, Reid stunned a meeting of Senate Democrats by announcing he was scrapping Baucus-Grassley, replacing it with a much cheaper, more narrowly crafted, $15 billion version.

Who is in charge over there? Getting any sort of agreement between the sides should be cause for a party and looked like Obama was ready to hop on board. And now Reid scuttles it because of the political optics? And how bad were those optics, really? Most of the country has show in poll after poll that they are fed up with the partisan gridlock. This could be a win-win for everyone.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey sees the jobs bill as Porkulus Part Two, an argument with some merit, depending on how the spending is constructed.

Reid’s decision takes the second stimulus package cost down from $85 billion to $15 billion. That may please fiscal conservatives, but it sets up an embarrassing problem for Barack Obama. No one believes that his $787 billion Porkulus package, now repriced to $862 billion, worked to create jobs, but the Left wing of Democrats thinks it didn’t work because the Democrats didn’t spend enough money. Obama himself has promised a “hard pivot” to job creation and built expectations for a large-scale effort. A $15 billion program that only contains the silly payroll-tax exemption that gives businesses a maximum $6000 for every person they hire and keep all year, more highway project money, a business tax deduction that amounts to a whopping $35 million over 10 years, and a program allowing states to borrow money at a lower interest rate will not only not create jobs, but it will make a laughingstock of the notion that Congress or Obama is taking the problem seriously.

I don’t see every element of the proposal as a lost cause. It’s certainly a lot more targeted and a little more promising than the original porkulus project. But the real failure here, as I see it, is having the Senate Democratic leadership walk away from possible progress for what will likely prove an entirely futile political maneuver.