The Washington Post is reporting that the Senate has just passed the economic stimulus bill as revised by moderate Republicans last week. I suppose one has to be grateful that some action is coming from Congress to the President’s desk, but this isn’t the action I would like to see. It can be argued that the new President made a mistake in watering down the stimulus package in the first place, that he had enough public support going in to overcome the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Paul Krugman has argued as much in a recent op-ed essay, and I agree. Here’s how Krugman describes the administration’s alleged mistake:

. . . [M]any people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

But that was never going to happen, and here’s how it played out. Rush Limbaugh announced that he hoped President Obama would fail, even as the president was earnestly seeking Republican input and support for the stimulus package (big media event). The President seemed rattled, appeared to strike back. Then, all House Republicans voted against the package and blamed Nancy Pelosi. Subsequently Lindsay Graham and others appeared on the Senate floor and in the media to attack the stimulus package in advance of the Senate’s votes on the bill. “[T]he stimulus legislation was not handled in ‘a true bipartisan fashion,'” Graham bloviated in the best Limbaugh style. And what’s the evidence that countered Obama’s overtures to Republicans over the past weeks? As John McCain explained last Sunday on Face the Nation, All House Republicans voted against the stimulus and “all but three Republicans stayed together” in the Senate. Clearly there had been a Republican decision to oppose the bill and blame the Democrats for their opposition.

I’m grateful to the Los Angeles Times for this photo of the arch-bloviator, It has appeared in a number of places; the Washington Post references it to J. Scott Applewhite of the Associated Press. And I’m grateful to Al Franken for explaining where Rush Limbaugh gets his facts and opinions. Franken has also called Limbaugh a disinfotainer, using a term I first heard from Howard Rheingold. Disinfotainment is more than mere demagoguery, is marked by deeper strains of deceit and cynicism. The drama makes for good TV, satisfies current standards of newsworthiness. We get bloviation and counter bloviation — balanced reporting requires that somebody like Claire McCaskill balance Graham and somebody like Rachel Maddow balance Limbaugh (though I love Rachel Maddow a lot, and my vote for McCaskill is one of the more satisfying votes I have cast in my life). But in the long run we all suffer from the charade, and the public interest isn’t served when the appearance of fairness gives bad arguments and bad faith equal representation with good. It may be that President Obama is making some rookie mistakes as he did during the campaign, when he generally overcame them. I hope he can do some overcoming now and do it fast. The stakes are high, as he often reminds us himself.

And it could even be the case that this young President believed John McCain and Lindsay Graham when they promised bipartisanship three months ago just after the election and issued a joint statement with him promising to “change the bad habits of Washington.” But McCain and Graham knew they could count on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to give them plenty of opportunities to cry foul, and this time the President gave them one too, in last week’s apeech to the House Democrats at Williamsburg. Here’s Graham crying crocodile tears on the Senate floor afterwards:

What we’ve done is we’ve lost a young president’s promise to change things. . . . [W]e got a chance to start over. We’re in the first month of the administration, and I have never been more concerned about lost opportunity than I am tonight.

One suspects the good Senator’s concern is entirely for the election of 2010, when the Democrats stand to lose congressional seats if history repeats itself. The political calculation is that Republicans potentially have much to gain from voting against the stimulus, and even more if they can weaken it still further. No one expects the economy to improve quickly. Republicans may be expecting to benefit if the stimulus appears not to be working as political campaigning heats up.