The envelopes have been opened but the winners' names have yet to be read.

The big political stories are evident: Barack Obama corrected course. (Ceci Connolly in the WP today has interesting details.) Nancy Pelosi pulled out the stops. The Republicans, voting en bloc, were unable to arrest the onward march of socialism. So the House lunged toward a health care reform that--

Well, beyond the bullet-point items (no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps), what exactly does it do? The press has been busy with the intricate, lurid, cliffhanging politics. Now attentive, curious, educated people are Googling like mad to find out what's in the bill.

The papers and other news sites that are first to publish a well-designed digest of the bill will drive a lot of traffic.

A friend of mine, an editor of a major magazine, chortled Saturday night how much fun it was going to be, once the House voted for health care reform, to watch the media's master narrative swing from Obama the overreaching flop to Obama the sage who patiently mapped the reefs and masterfully steered the ship of state through turbulent waters. I thought my friend was cynical but that his projection was right, which I guess made me cynical too but unwilling to admit it.

The morning after the House voted for health care reform, the big swing is on, and yes, it is whole lots of fun. And why shouldn't we be entitled to some fun after so many disheartening months? So really all I have to say, this Monday morning, is two things. One: it's splendid to win a huge battle. It's just as splendid to win after you've made some mistakes, because Woody Allen was wrong: only ten percent of life is showing up, but a full eighty percent or so is learning from mistakes.

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The glib Mr. Brooks, unable to see depredations on the right unless false equivalency alerts go off to put him in mind of depredations on the left, struck again. My response in today's NYT:

To the Editor:

Re "The Wal-Mart Hippies" (column, March 5):

Superficially, David Brooks has a point about certain parallels between the New Left of 40 years ago and today's Tea Party. But the superficial resemblances disguise the deeper differences.

The New Left began as a just movement for civil rights, against arbitrary authority and against the abuse of national power abroad. Over the course of years, it evolved -- and in many cases devolved -- toward a mood of reckless, go-it-alone embattlement.

The Tea Party movement begins with atavistic delusions about the government and shows no signs of understanding, let alone addressing, the contemporary, out-of-control economy.

There were certainly paranoid strains in the New Left, but the Tea Party has yet to exhibit anything but misapprehensions.

Todd Gitlin
New York, March 5, 2010

The writer is a onetime leader of the New Left and the author of "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage."

The WP website flags "Reassessing economic stimulus after first year" this way:

The administration acknowledges its program of spending cuts and tax breaks has yet to ease joblessness as it readies new stimulus package.

Could this be the same article that the print edition flags as follows?

The giant economic stimulus package enacted a year ago has helped stabilize the economy but has not made much of a dent in the nation's vast unemployment.

Reader, it could, and it is. The same piece that declares that the stimulus "has yet to ease joblessness" goes on to tell us that

Many economic analysts also agree with the administration's claims that the stimulus law has created or preserved 2 million jobs and that the number will total 3.5 million by the time the spending ultimately plays out.

Neil Irwin, Lori Montgomery and Alec MacGillis, who share the byline, can agree on one thing: "Obama and Republican leaders trad[ed] barbs." Thanks for the enlightenment, folks. Is the Post subtly alerting us that the country can get along perfectly well (i. e., badly) without newspapers?

P. S. Jonathan Chait at TNR scoops up many examples of conservatives claiming that the stimulus was worthless, including John Boehner's classic "the stimulus isn't creating jobs for American workers." This is the kind of garbage that the WP thinks--let's make that "thinks," in scare quotes--deserves to be equated with Democratic "barbs"?

Some good news: the White House celebrates a 94-2 vote for one of its appointments, Martha Johnson as GSA administrator, after a nine-month delay.

The bad news: the official statement from the White House Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer, maintains that the delay illustrates "why Americans are so frustrated with Washington." "Historically," he writes, "the filibuster has been used as a way to try and reach a bipartisan compromise; now it's just a tactic used to gum up the works."

Reach a bipartisan compromise? Really? Was that what Strom Thurmond was up to back when the Dixiecrats pulled out the stops to squelch the threat of creeping socialism civil rights legislation?

I understand why Obama wants to make nice to the Republicans. But please don't do it by obfuscating history. Teach.

Robert Schlesinger blogs about a recent Pew poll showing that

all of 26 percent of Americans know that 60 votes are required to break a Senate filibuster. Almost the same number (25 percent) think that a simple majority (51 votes, for those of you scoring at home) can break a filibuster. Seven percent of Americans think the number is 67 votes and five percent think it's 75 votes. And 37 percent had the good sense to throw up their hands and admit ignorance.

It gets worse:

The same poll shows that only 32 percent of Americans realized that the health bill had passed the Senate without any Republican support. Almost as many Americans (29 percent) think that some number of GOPers voted for it (that breaks out to 13 percent who think that 5 Republicans voted for it, and 8 percent each who put the number at 10 or 20).

If the communications chief won't explain what the filibuster's about, in no uncertain terms, how does he expect to move public opinion? How much ignorance can you let stand before being ruled by it?

Is the WP's Richard Cohen afraid somebody will lift his pontification license if he gets over (a) his simple-mindedness and (b) his willies?

Here is Cohen today on why

there is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America's critics but the message sent to Americans themselves.

"Almost nothing." This is not only risible, but Cohen makes a serious category mistake. It's not the sole purpose of government to soothe a public obsession. The mistake is particularly obtuse because the central purpose of terrorism is to rouse feeling--the feeling of terror. Terrorism is feel-bad politics by other means. If anything plays into the hand of terrorists, it's banging on about how the sky is falling.

If Americans are driven around the bend by al-Qaeda's minions--some of whom join up precisely because Bush's America acted on the principle that nobody should care how America looks abroad--this is no reason why Obama should return to the go-it-alone bravado of George W. Bush. But Cohen, like Bush against Kerry in 2004, is indignant that American policy should have to pass a foreign test:

more is at stake here than America's image abroad -- namely the security and peace of mind of Americans in America.

To be sure, "insuring domestic Tranquility" is one of the purposes of the Constitution. Here's the hed:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,

Note well : Tranquiity is supposed to coexist with Justice, defence, Welfare, and Liberty. But get out of Cohen's way--the bulldozer is coming through. He'll brook no compound list of virtues--virtues which, at times, clash. Cohen writes as if he has found an invisible-ink article of the Constitution that says "the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security," which, "sad to say, has eroded under Barack Obama."

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Obama, who hates to thunder against Republicans outright--it's not in his metabolism--held fast to post-partisanship tonight:

what the American people hope - what they deserve - is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics.

Or did he?

The strongest defense of Obama's approach to the "post-partisan" chimera (which I wrote about most recently here) would be to underscore his later line:

To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills.

Without telling the House exactly what to do, he repeated lauded them and chastised the Senate. Much as it would have been satisfying for him to plunk the right tactic in front of the Congress and dare them to reject it, I don't fault him for refraining. What he said about health care was the smart thing to do at this moment. Even the part about welcoming new ideas. (As I type, Valerie Jarrett is on MSNBC clarifying that he wasn't saying start all over again.)

And yet, in his postpartisan way, he planted his flag. He took on the Supreme Court's recent corporate-political funding decision to their faces as Justice Alito winced, shook his head, and muttered, "Not true." He reaffirmed his intention to end "don't ask, don't tell."

Most important, he took on the Republican leadership directly, criticizing them (if a bit oddly) on their wildly undemocratic focus:

if the Republican leadership is going to insist that sixty votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.

I could imagine more satisfying endings to this last sentence than the dying fall of those final words--say, something like ...then you will be sent back to the wilderness where you deserve to wander--but he did go take a swipe at the tyranny of the supermajority requirement.

The man is not a blamer. He refused to scorch the bankers. But he chided them nonetheless:

We can't allow financial institutions, including those that take your deposits, to take risks that threaten the whole economy.

And:

I have proposed a fee on the biggest banks. I know Wall Street isn't keen on this idea, but if these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need.

My taste runs more to the tone of Franklin Roosevelt, who in his first State of the Union, in 1934, began by declaring that he and the Congress

have been selected to carry out a mandate of the whole people, in order that without partisanship you and I may cooperate to continue the restoration of our national wellbeing and, equally important, to build on the ruins of the past a new structure designed better to meet the present problems of modern civilization..

but quickly went on to add:

Now that we are definitely in the process of recovery, lines have been rightly drawn between those to whom this recovery means a return to old methods--and the number of these people is small--and those for whom recovery means a reform of many old methods, a permanent readjustment of many of our ways of thinking and therefore of many of our social and economic arrangements. . . . .

Obama throws a softer gauntlet. But maybe, for this moment, it's the right one.

We're told on the front page of today's NYT that "Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate."

We're told inside that Scott Brown's election "deprived Democrats of their 60-vote majority."

Also inside, we're told that "Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority."

Three different pieces, filed from two different bureaus. I deduce that it's become NYT policy to refer to the 60-vote supermajority that's come to be considered, egregiously, the new normal--so normal that David Axelrod referred to it recently as a Senate "tradition"--as a "majority."

That's cra-a-zy. Call 60 votes out of 100 a "supermajority," a "60-vote supermajority," a "filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority," whatever, but do not distort the meaning of the word "majority" simply because the Republicans have been acting as though 41 votes constituted a majority and Democrats have been rather gentle with them about it.

Just plain stop it.

I'm wholeheartedly with Theda Skocpol: Whether Coakley loses to Scott Brown or squeaks out a win, Barack Obama, the empiricist, must learn from what is, one way or the other, a defeat.

He should take a hard, hard look at the last year. He tried post-partisanship, disdained the all-out fight, and the Republicans wouldn't play. They preferred to organize for his Waterloo. The Obama movement, formerly Obama for America, now Organizing for America, went dormant. Energies cooled. Disillusions piled up. Enter the Tea Party. Anger abhors a vacuum. Blue Dogs buttered up with insurance company bucks. Many progressives rediscovered the pleasures of marginality. Democrats tried to straddle. Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and, God help us, Martha Coakley were not, to say the least, convincing vessels for delivering the message that Wall Street has to be tamed, yesterday.

And so, slippery Scott Brown became the face of Change-You-Can-Believe-In.

Whether Obama actually believed in post-partisanship or thought it a clever ploy, doesn't matter. The important thing is to recognize, now, while there are still three years left to his presidency, that pragmatism of that stripe DOESN'T WORK.

Mr. President, you can't nice your way to more stimulus, job creation, green policies, curbing the power of money, public investment. The cut-deficits-first crowd will crush you. You have got to rouse popular support for majority rule. You have to join the political reform movement against anti-democratic Senate supermajority rules that tie an already undemocratic body in knots--not because you can win that fight, which is rigged, at the moment, but because the know-nothing party is not a strategic partner, it's an adversary. You have got to tell a largely inattentive public that the Republicans are the party that stands in the way of progress. You have got to display chapter and verse. You have got to insist.

If you don't try taking the high ground, you're no longer the pragmatist, you're the ideologue whose ideology is moderation.

Mr. President: The only thing you have to fear is timidity itself.

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Both Josh and Jonathan Chait have posted on the discovery that Mr. Tea Party with a Human Face, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, aligned himself with the wingnut conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born out of wedlock. (Not that there would be anything wrong with that.)

A blogger at Blue Mass Group has unearthed the tantalizing little tidbit that the sources for this birther crackpot claim are the likes of anti-Semitic drive-by crackpots Andy Martin ("Exterminate Jew power") and Jerome Corsi (of Swift Boat fame). These are evidently the sort of people Scott Brown wants to bring along in his disconcertingly well-run campaign to represent the people of Massachusetts in the world's most laughable legislative body.

We know what happens when Democrats run inept campaigns and personable idiots run as just-folks Republicans. Read: Al Gore and George W. Bush.

The Coakley people have run what sounds like the world's worst campaign, but here's a redemption tip I pass on from a friend: The Democrats should put together a radio ad featuring the Scott Brown innuendo about Obama, and stuff the airwaves tomorrow and Tuesday morning-(not least on African-American stations. Tomorrow's version should start: "A message from the Democratic Party for Martin Luther King Day." Then something about how this election isn't about Coakley, it's about Barack Obama and the misguided Americans who still can't accept that a black man is the legitimate president of the United States.

Update 10:15 pm: Max Blumenthal reports that Obama-birth-certificate-hunter-in-chief Andy Martin is planning to defend Brown on his blog.

The Nobel-winning economist Robert Solow, in a respectful review of John Cassidy's fine book How Markets Fail, asks:

How much do all those exotic securities [credit-default swaps and the like], and the institutions that create them, buy them, and sell them, actually contribute to the "real" economy that provides us with goods and services, now and for the future?

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Block it. Crush it. Detonate it.

You've probably read that the reason we don't have a chief Transportation Safety official in place today is that Obama's nominee, Erroll Southers, a former FBI special agent, Los Angeles World Airports Police Department assistant chief for homeland security and intelligence, and associate director of the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, has been blocked by Senator Jim DeMint (R-Confederacy).

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Genesis has more to say about Sodom's specific iniquities than about Gomorrah's, though it leaves no doubt (in 19:24) that Gomorrah's fate was as dire as its sister city's: brimstone and fire. This grim destiny of unrestrained sinners plays no small part in the theology of the Christian Right, for they believe that tribulation is the price--and proof--of salvation to come. In their mental universe, tribulation is a very sign of rectitude, for God only tests those who are sufficiently advanced to need testing in the first place. Millennialists of various stripes have long borrowed such scenarios from the Old Testament prophets, who sounded far more convincing when they thundered against the sins of the Israelites than when they tried to paint a luminous future.

So the fact that the Vitters, Ensigns, Haggards, Sanfords, and Craigs are brought low for their Gomorrhic tendencies doesn't, at least yet, shatter the Party of Palin. Neither does their plain ignorance and confusion. They are the Brimstone and Fire Party. Tribulation is their middle name. Hypocrisy to them is proof that the Lord works in wondrous ways. The time they spend in the wilderness is time well spent--divinely sanctioned.

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I hate to beat up on the beleaguered NYT, which is buying-out and laying-off staffers to beat the band. If it's still the best newspaper in the world--and it probably is--this is in no small part because the race to the bottom is so intense; but also because, in every issue, there's some light of intelligence to be witnessed.

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I'm glad to see that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has launched a site with a petition calling on Harry Reid to lower the cloture number required to stop a filibuster from 60 to 55. Moderates ought to approve: It's a moderate move.

I don't think Harry Reid can pull this off by himself, but it's good to know that there's some buzz on the progressive side in the Senate to change the Senate rules so that majorities can legislate. That would seem a small accomplishment. It's going to be a major one. It will take years of work.

Let's get to work.

White House, this means you.

P. S. The estimable Ed Kilgore clinches the point about how much is at stake:

Since the Senate already has a built-in red-state bias, a supermajority requirement would basically represent a death sentence for progressive initiatives in the near future.