Looking around the blogosphere, the growing consensus among liberal blogs (too lazy to link, just go to memeorandum and hunt for angsty titles) is that Obama is losing control of the debate. I am not so sure if I would say that, yet, although we are seeing the polling numbers for the stimulus bill plummeting. This makes perfect sense, because even I am not sure the stimulus bill is a good bill or worth it.
There is a reason for this, and that is something Tim has touched on several times, and I have mentioned over and over. No one is selling it. The Democrats are simply AWOL. All I see on my tv are Republicans talking about wasteful spending, as if they have any credibility on that topic. I would pay to see Barney Frank matched up against a Republican opposed to the stimulus bill, because every Democrat has an easy retort- “If you have so many good economic ideas, how come you never passed any of them along to the last President?”
It isn’t so much that Obama is losing control in the debate. The Democrats just aren’t participating, and this isn’t so much a debate as a Republican monologue. We all know, given our “liberal” media, how that is going to play out in the long run.
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BTW- The next time anyone in Congress opposes any infrastructure stimulus spending, whether it be on roads, bridges, whatever, the very first thing I would do is go through every single Iraq appropriations bill, target line by line the spending appropriations for rebuilding Iraq, and then look at the roll call vote. I bet all sorts of fun could be had pointing out “fiscal conservatives” who repeatedly voted to build infrastructure in Iraq, without so much as blinking, who are now getting the vapors about a couple billion being spent domestically on similar projects. America First, the saying was, right? The Democrats do have interns, don’t they?