Or, maybe I’m wrong. Noam Scheiber thinks so, or at least has a different reading of events. Writing for “The Plank” at The New Republic, Scheiber contends it’s all a rope-a-dope and that Obama is in complete control of the discourse and the politics of the stimulus. Here are a couple of salient pragraphs:

Here’s what I’d guess is likely to happen over the next few days: The conference committee tasked with ironing out differences between the House and Senate stimulus bills will undo most of the roughly $65 billion in cuts to state aid, education, and health care spending the Senate centrists negotiated. To pay for it, they’ll junk the $70-billion in Alternative Minimum Tax relief the Senate showered on the upper-middle class.

Republicans will protest that Obama and Congressional Democrats have trampled on the Senate compromise and unilaterally re-imposed their liberal priorities. They’ll sprinkle in a collection of shopworn clichés, like “behind closed doors,” and “dead of night.” But, in the end, it won’t matter. The media, having already proclaimed Obama the Beltway’s only bona fide bipartisan, is hardly going to rewrite the narrative at this late stage. And no senator who voted for the bill in the first time around is going to want to explain why he or she suddenly became “anti-job.”

According to this narrative, Republicans tried to hijack the process of developing the stimulus and Obama stole it back. As Scheiber concludes, “By yesterday evening, you could almost see it dawn on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell that he’d been played.” If this is so, then John McCain’s appearance on Face the Nation last Sunday should be read as damage control, not gloating.

—I hope so.