With Economy Uncertain, So Is Obama's Plan

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."

Obama defends stimulus, pushes health reform

(NEWSER) - The White House is cracking down on its critics—and on laggards within the Democratic Party, too. Republican naysayers on the economic stimulus and health care are getting the roughest treatment, Politico reports. After Kentucky Sen. Jon Kyl railed against the efficacy of stimulus spending, four Cabinet secretaries wrote to his state's governor saying, "If you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Sen. Kyl suggests, please let me know." More»

Projects deficit will soar to $1.75T

(NEWSER) - President Obama's budget plan, which he delivers to Congress today, attempts to balance a broad spending program with a commitment to slash the deficit in half by the end of his first term. It calls for tax increases on the wealthy and spending cuts to fund a "down payment" on a huge expansion of health care. It also makes permanent middle-class tax cuts introduced in this month's stimulus package, paid for by a cap-and-trade system that will force companies to pay to pollute. More»

Despite new prez's gifts, Brooks worries he's moving too fast

(NEWSER) - David Brooks is not a liberal, but the New York Times columnist doesn't hesitate to call himself "a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him." Yet as the new administration has thrown itself at a dozen staggering problems, from fixing health care and the auto industry to creating jobs and reviving banks, Brooks' conservative "alarm bells" have been ringing. "I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well," he writes. More»

Ezra Klein thinks we should look at his policies, not his birth certificate

(NEWSER) - Don’t listen to Donald Trump. Barack Obama is not a Socialist Kenyan Muslim. The truth is far more startling: He’s a moderate Republican from the 1990s, writes Ezra Klein of the Washington Post . Obama’s major policy ideas—mandate-based health care reform, cap-and-trade, and raising taxes to reduce the deficit—are all things that Republicans advocated back then, Klein observes. But now they’re running away from them, seemingly just to oppose Obama. More»