President Obama, so recently triumphant, is now reeling.

As Washington observers recognize, this entire debacle became predictable the moment the then president-elect decided to permit the House leadership to draft his stimulus legislation. While Obama was behaving like a professor, holding seminars with economists Lawrence Summers, Paul Volcker and Christina Romer, Democrats in the House were behaving like politicians, using Obama’s call for a stimulus as cover for forking over tens of billions of dollars to Democratic interest groups.