Economy

Old School, New School

Greenwald makes a smart but off-the-mark case against the president's tactics versus the Republicans:

Some Obama supporters will claim that the whole post-partisan song is nothing more than a political game, a super-shrewd, exotic political tactic Obama is employing in order to cast the GOP as obstructionists. But if so, that's a Beltway tactic almost as old as Obama himself.

It's not. It's a whole new bag.

Hilzoy, on the other hand, makes a smart and totally spot-on case in favor of the president's tactics against the Republicans:

The House Republicans, by contrast, looked silly. They were carping about tiny bits of the stimulus (the capitol mall?!). They changed the bits they objected to from one day to the next, and looked for all the world like what I take them to be: people who were determined to oppose the stimulus bill from the outset.

I basically wrote the same thing in my Huffington Post column yesterday. This president is absolutely not a Harry Reid Democratic Capitulation Machine. And I see nothing in the president's style that indicates he'll allow himself to be rolled by this typical, off-the-shelf display of Republican political hackery.

Getting back to Greenwald's "Beltway tactic" argument, I think what's getting lost in the mix here is that the Republicans are acting like they're the majority party in Congress, and the cable news people are treating them as such. They're not. So while there might be a concession here or there and while there might be civil dialogue coming from the president (for now), this doesn't mean he's falling into the Reid capitulation pit of despair.