Obama reminds GOP in stimulus meeting: “I won”

posted at 2:19 pm on January 23, 2009 by Allahpundit
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The golden age of bipartisanship beginneth.

During a morning meeting with congressional leaders from both parties, President Obama acknowledged the philosophical differences between his stimulus package and the Republican plan – but, sources familiar with the conversation said, Obama then noted: “I won.”…

But perhaps taking a cue from Obama’s “I won” line when Democrats were asked if they were concerned about Republicans blocking the package, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had a swift one-word answer: “No.”

Vintage O: Always willing to hear the other side out, never willing to actually vote with them. Here’s where we pause a moment to daydream about what a difference 45 Senate seats would have made instead of 41, then come to our senses and realize that it would have made no difference at all. The GOP’s simply not going to obstruct Hopenchange this early, when he has this much goodwill from the public, when the economic circumstances are this dire, and when even conservative economists are endorsing some sort of stimulus.

Just how rancid is this crap sandwich, anyway? Even David Brooks thinks it’s too much of a liberal Christmas tree:

This $825 billion bill has to be passed within weeks. There’s no time for fundamental rethinking or new approaches. Instead, there’s a sloppy profusion of 152 different appropriations — off-the-shelf ideas that mostly create costlier versions of the status quo.

The committee staff took the kernel of President Obama’s vision — infrastructure programs to create jobs — and surrounded it with an undisciplined sprawl of health, education, entitlement and other spending. There’s money for nurse training, Medicare, Head Start, boatyard support, home weatherization and so on. Eleven of the programs in the bill account for the vast majority of the actual job creation. The rest may be worthy or not, but they have little to do with stimulus. The total package is so diffuse, it costs $223,000 to create a single job.

McConnell and Boehner put on a brave face after the meeting but there’s simply nothing they can do. Skip ahead to the end for an inkling of the super-secret plan to jumpstart the economy with hundreds of millions of dollars for contraception.

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