Centeragious and Obama's "outreach"

With all due respect to Mr. Krugman, this idea that Obama "negotiated with himself" which then resulted in a weaker stimulus bill than he could have otherwise gotten...well...I'm not getting that. Yes, he encouraged and wanted "bipartisanship," but there was no way the bill was going to get past the threat of a filibuster without a few Republican votes, not to mention the "centrists" in the Democratic side of the aisle as well. If you want to place blame, blame the "centrists" who, as Krugman, Bard-like, puts it, "extracted their pound of flesh" in order to maintain their "centrist" bona fides. One of them even more or less admitted they weakened the bill.

Beyond that, Obama has again illustrated that he's looking beyond the daily/nightly news cycle. And he's looking beyond this stimulus bill. By reaching out to Republicans he didn't invite an ineffective, weak stimulus bill, but by doing so he did look reasonable and made Republicans look obstructionist. And when it became clear that Republicans weren't going to play ball and were instead going to rehash the last eight years of terrible economic direction, he and his administration changed the tone, to devastating effect.

All of that -- the outreached hand followed by the stern lecture when the hand was refused -- may just have furthered his mandate, at least when it comes to handling the economy.