Why does Obama cling to least significant 'stimulus'

E.J. Dionne:

The irony of President Barack Obama's Blue Tuesday is that the wall-to-wall television interviews he granted were designed not to apologize for Tom Daschle's fall from grace but to fight back against the Republicans' success in tarnishing his stimulus package.

Obama's network appearances were planned as a response to a wholly unanticipated development: Republicans -- short on new ideas, low on votes, and deeply unpopular in the polls -- have been winning the media wars over the president's central initiative.

They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to "less than 1 percent of the overall package." But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts.

Daschle's withdrawal as the nominee for secretary of health and human services poses a long-term challenge to the administration's ambitious health care plans because he was so crucial to the White House's strategy. But the battering the stimulus has taken is an immediate problem.

Although Obama aides dismiss the media coverage as "cable chatter" important only inside the "Washington echo chamber," they acknowledge that Congress does its work inside that noisy hall and that the journalistic back-and-forth has tainted its key legislative objective. "We didn't give it as much air cover last week as we should," said one top adviser. "We lost a week."

This thinking was reflected during Obama's interviews, once he got through his apologies for having "screwed up" the Daschle matter.

Obama kept bringing the stimulus discussion back to the bill's purpose of restoring life to a cratered economy. He also highlighted the bill's substantive elements -- in health care, education, energy and relief to fiscally ailing states -- that have received scant attention in news accounts dominated by political questions about how much Obama should concede to the Republican minority.

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The fact is that if it were just the least significant parts that were the problem, Obama could just drop them and win the day. But the fact is that in what Dionne calls the substantive elements there is little to no stimulus to the economy and the overall size of the package is scary big. At a time when Americans are cutting back on their own spending, watching the government spend even more on programs aimed at buying Democrat votes is not all that enticing.

The fact is they are losing because the public does not support the bill and the Republicans are tapping into that none support rather than leading it.