IS IT TOO SOON TO BRING OUT THE KILLER RABBIT?:

What mandate for change?: Barack Obama is already facing pushback from Congress about his economic stimulus plan. But it's coming from Democrats. (Mike Madden, 1/12/09, Salon)

[T]he main target of his blitz isn't necessarily voters, who polls show are on board with just about anything that will help save jobs. And it isn't the Republican opposition in Congress; they may not go along with the plan in the end, but Democrats have big enough margins in both the House and the Senate that they shouldn't need too many GOP votes to pass Obama's plan. As it turns out, that's the problem: Democrats, who with their expanded majorities were supposed to make it easy for Obama's agenda to cruise through Congress, started objecting to the stimulus plan as soon as details leaked to the press. The objections were pretty basic: Obama wanted to spend too much on tax cuts, and not enough on infrastructure. The criticims were mildly phrased, but there was no question that Obama and his aides would have some work to do to push the stimulus plan into law. (They already had to scrap their hope of having the bill ready for Obama to sign on Jan. 20, which turned out to be impossible, and are now aiming for mid-February, before the first recess of the year.)

"There are some differences of opinion as to how to approach this thing," said Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, after the party held a closed meeting Thursday with Larry Summers, a senior Obama economic advisor, and David Axelrod, his political guru. "There was no violent reaction against it, but there are people saying, 'Would you consider this as part of it?'" Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, who isn't exactly a raving liberal, said the tax cuts didn't win him over any more than they did most of his colleagues. "Tax cuts are going to be persuasive to some quarters, no doubt about it, but others are going to have the question of whether it's just trickle down or trickle up," he told Salon after leaving the meeting. Democratic leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, went even further, flatly stating Obama would have to compromise. "Barack Obama has never said he will give us this bill and that's what you take," he said.

So much for that mandate. Polite though it may be, the fight over the stimulus plan is already showing that it may not be as easy for Obama to govern with a Democratic Congress as it is to campaign at the top of a Democratic ticket. Before he's even taken charge, Obama has also gotten pushback from senior Democrats over his choice of Leon Panetta as CIA director (though that dispute seems to have been settled, and Panetta is likely to be confirmed) and rumors that he'll name CNN contributor Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2009 8:57 PM