In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

TPM's Josh Marshall asks:

Can someone help me come up with an argument for why the Obama stimulus plan isn't turning out to be a painful joke?

...as he references the news that Obama's stimulus package contains $300 billion in tax cuts.

The answer of course is "I got nothin', bro." It is very much a painful joke. As I said yesterday, the most likely outcome is that the GOP will insist on passing the tax cuts immediately, and will then block spending with enough Blue Dog Democrat interference in the House and/or Senate to assure that anything that does pass will simply fail to help the economy. Obama will take the blame for it, and by the time November 2010 rolls around the economic picture will still be so bad that the Dems may even lose control of one or both chambers, assuring that what recovery we do have will be targeted at the top instead of the bottom up.

In other words, the Dems still don't have enough of a working majority to deal with the completely repudiated conservative economic garbage of the last 25 years because Washington is still run by the Village Centrists who want the status quo of Reagan/Bush "trickle-down" nonsense.

If the Dems can't find their spines in 2009 and run the country like voters actually put them in charge of things, we're looking at far, far worse times ahead.

[UPDATE] Paul Krugman weighs in and nails it cold.

What this says is that there’s a reasonable economic case for including a significant amount of tax cuts in the package, mainly in year one.

But the numbers being reported — 40 percent of the whole, two-year plan — sound high. And all the news reports say that the high tax-cut share is intended to assuage Republicans; what this presumably means is that this was the message the off-the-record Obamanauts were told to convey.

And that’s bad news.

Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they’ll demand 100%. Then they’ll start the thing about how you can’t cut taxes on people who don’t pay taxes (with only income taxes counting, of course) and demand that the plan focus on the affluent. Then they’ll demand cuts in corporate taxes. And Mitch McConnell is already saying that state and local governments should get loans, not aid — which would undermine that part of the plan, too.

OK, maybe this is just a head fake from the Obama people — they think they can win the PR battle by making bipartisan noises, then accusing the GOP of being obstructionist. But I’m really worried that they’re sending off signals of weakness right from the beginning, and that they’re just going to embolden the opposition.

For Pete's sake, if Krugman the economist can clearly see the politics in this and how it plays out, it's got to be patently obvious to everyone. I don't think this is a head fake. I think Obama is walking right into the Clinton Triangulation Trap(tm) and somehow thinks he's smart enough to come out ahead.

Why the hell is Obama going at this from a position of weakness? What makes him think the GOP has any respect for his position or his agenda when they just stopped publicly calling him all but a secret Muslim terrorist only two months ago? They will not stop until they get everything they want: another Bush trillion dollar plus tax cut for the rich and especially for corporations. If they don't get it, they will destroy the entire spending package and the economy along with it. If they do get it, they will destroy the economy and finish the most massive transfer of wealth in history and eliminate the middle class.

Obama's already playing like he's lost, and he's not even President yet.