6 Conservatives Worth Obama's Time

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."

3 Republicans vote yea, 3 Dems vote nay

(NEWSER) - Working on a second consecutive weekend, the Senate passed a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill today, with the support of three Republicans but the opposition of three Democrats. The measure has already cleared the House and now advances to President Obama, who is expected to sign it. With pressing year-end money matters out of the way, Congress appears ready to turn its attention back to health care reform, the Hill reports. More»

Graham calls Arizona senator 'de facto leader of the Republican Party'

(NEWSER) - John McCain has made the transformation from possible Obama ally to a full-blooded Republican partisan, though insiders aren’t quite sure why. Some see his vocal opposition to the Obama administration’s policies as a concession to the realities of next year’s election, where he may face a challenge from the right. Friend Lindsey Graham paints McCain’s outrage as common sense. “What would have been a change was if he wasn’t pissed off,” he tells Politico . More»

Snowe, Collins are backbone of administration's bipartisan coalition

(NEWSER) - Maine’s moderate Republican senators find themselves unexpectedly empowered in the Obama era. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, along with Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, form the bipartisan wedge President Obama can use to get bills—like the stimulus package—past a Senate filibuster. After years of being taken for granted by the Bush administration, the senators from Maine appreciate the attention, Time reports. More»

Holds highly unusual 1-on-1 meetings with stimulus holdouts

(NEWSER) - President Obama is reaching across the aisle to moderate senators whose votes are crucial to passage of the economic stimulus bill. He put in a call to John McCain, who has been a vocal critic of the bill’s current incarnation. “We'd like to sit down and try to work something out that would be truly job creating,” McCain said after the conversation. And the president held 'remarkable' one-on-one with three swing senators, Politico reports. More»