This week, there's been much reflecting upon the chorus of economists saying that Obama's proposal isn't big enough.  Josh's last update on his take on this story referenced a post at 538 suggesting that Obama's game is to start low and let Congress bid it up.  

I have to agree with Silver on this one, if only because this is what I've been saying in a series of comments--some unnecessarily ill-tempered--and a blog post for the last several days.  Digby, for one seems to agree that what we're seeing is Kabuki theatre, a manipulative political exercise in which Obama is more interested in getting outside forces to "force" him to take what he really wants than in getting credit.  

In this regard, Josh raises an important point:

Second, when I write stuff critical of Obama, either on the policy or political fronts, there's always a rush of emails saying, 'Give him a chance!' 'Leave Obama alone!' 'He's probably got a plan you don't know about!' and so on. He may. I hope he does. But all of these debates are dynamic. You never assume anything. If Nate's right about what Obama's plan is, having people pushing for something better from the outside is part of it. So under either scenario, holding your tongue makes no sense, in addition to being unethical.

 Josh is absolutely right that if there's a plan along the lines of that described by Nate Silver and Digby (and me), it won't work if prominent bloggers and economists are pushing hard for more spending and less business tax cutting in the bill.  However, it does seem to me that an awful lot of people are missing a lot of what's going on because they are reflexively applying analytical frames they developed over the last eight years to what Obama is doing. 

I think we've gotten so locked in to the Internet clock where an hour is a news cycle, a day is a month and eight years ago is forever that we're having trouble shaking off some of the habits of thought we evolved during the Bush years, because we can't remember anything else.  Specifically, many of us have become accustomed to being a lot smarter than the President of the United States.  We are used to a world where a guy who glanced over the news on the Internet during morning coffee has obtained more useful information about the state of the nation and the world than the President can from all of the vast means of information at his disposal.  Our patterns of thought are locked into a world where "political" means that objective facts are routinely suppressed or ignored when they don't conform to an ideologically driven worldview and that they are distorted or contradicted by lies when they don't serve the administration's narrowly-conceived political ends.  We have become accustomed to a world led by people who adhere to a dangerous admixture of post-modernism, literalism and rigid narrow-mindedness.  We've come to equate crude fear-mongering and ham-fisted tactics like political motivated criminal indictments with political savvy. 

Allow me to suggest that if one wants to do more than play the ever-befuddled Dr. Watson over the next eight years, one would do well to dig into their memory and recall what it was like back in the long lost days of the 90s when the president was smarter than most of us.  Even those frames won't be a good fit this time.  Bill Clinton was only obvious when it suited his purposes to be obvious, but however opaque his activities, there were always leakers--authorized or otherwise--to illuminate his thinking.  If Bill Clinton had been low-balling a massive spending bill in an effort to get outside experts and Congress to "force" him to increase it, there would have been a confidentially-sourced story in the WaPo explaining his strategy within 24 hours.  We're not going to get as much of that from Obama, if past practice is any indication. 

What we can do, however, is credit Obama with the native intelligence, open-mindedness and political shrewdness he's been demonstrating throughout his public life and apply a little logic to puzzle.  It's not about some Kool-Ade inspired hallucination of perfection or some totalitarian child-like faith in the infallibility my Glorious and Infallible Leader.  It's just seeing a an apparent mystery and using some logic--rather than analytical frames developed to explain the actions of an imbecile--to decode it. 

So what are we to make of the "Mystery of the Plan That Was Way Too Small?"  Is it too small because Obama is too dumb to believe Nobel prize winning economists?  Is Obama the kind of guy who believes his own inexpert opinion from the gut is as better than the opinion of some ivory tower intellectual?  I think all the availible evidence--and his own statements--indicates quite the contrary.  Throughout his campaign Obama emphasized that that kind of thinking had been one of the worst, most destructive aspects of the Bush years. 

Well then, is this bill too small because Obama's just too stubborn to admit he's wrong, that this is the plan he invented and he'll brook no gainsaying?  Well that seems to be what a lot of people in the comments here seem to think, but, I have to say, once again, wrong president, guys.    Nothing in his past indicates that Obama works and thinks this way. 

Well then, the answer must be that he's more interested in pleasing the Republicans than in doing the right thing, right? 

Seriously?  He's more interested in making the knuckle-walking nitwits who are left in the Republican caucuses happy than in saving the nation from the worst recession in decades?  He'd rather risk a recession that would cripple his presidency and possibly lose us our Congressional majorities in 2010 than be seen as partisan?  Or maybe you think he really does believe that the best thing to do in this situation is let the reckless ideologues whose intractable wrong-headedness created this mess call shape his policy? 

No, you say, none of that (and stop putting words in our straw mouths, you jerk) but maybe he thinks he needs their votes. 

The problem with that theory is that Obama has demonstrated that he knows how to count.  He won the nomination (without following the frantic advice of many a frantically worried blog commenter) because he could count delegates and set about accumulating a majority of them rather than just assuming the majority just happened as a result of campaigning.  He won the general because he could count electoral votes and, having counted them, concentrated on winning the states he needed to win rather than trying to win states he's already won (or couldn't win). 

And if he can count delegates and electoral votes, I expect his experience as a state and federal legislator have given him at least some skill in counting legislative noses.  Those who can do that will quickly discovery that notwhatstanding all the blustering and harrumphing they've been doing on the teevee, the Republicans of the 111th Congress are toothless, dehorned and neutered.  The House Republicans will get help from the House Blue Dogs?  Please. Each and every one of these people has to face the voters in 2010 and anyone who votes against this bill will be punished, especially if things get worse.  Prof. Keynes is Speaker of the House this year, and no Democrat will dare cross him.

But how about the Senate?  Obama thinks he has to kowtow to McConnell because McConnell has enough votes to block a cloture vote, right?  No.  Count the shiny red noses people: the Republican caucus is only going to have forty-one (41) votes this session.  Has anyone heard any Senate Democrat, even the quasi-Democrats like Lieberman and the Nelson Twins, criticizing this bill because it costs too much or doesn't have enough tax cuts?  As to the other vote we'll need to invoke cloture, Almost half of the Republican seats are up for election in 2010.  You think we can't peel off eight or nine of them for this vote? 

So if you've read this far, maybe you're asking "so, okay, smartass, what do you think his game is?" 

Well having eliminated the impossible and the highly unlikely, I think the answer is this: Obama just got out of Congress.  He is acutely aware that this is the United States Congress that's going to have to pass this thing and it this is a bill that must pass and must be signed.  It is, in fact, the most must-passiest, must signiest piece of legislation in decades.  A big chunk of his team likewise came out of Congress.  All of them have been around the Village for decades.  They've all seen how Congress works and when you add "must pass, must sign" to "Multiple Nobel Prize Winning Economists Say All Spending Limits Are Off," what you get is a gigantic, magnetic ball of glue that's going to pick up every pet project it passes as it rolls through the halls.  Even if Obama was banging his shoe on the table and squaling like a petulant chimp that this bill must be passed exactly as introduced, there is no chance--zero, zip, none--that it comes out of Congress without having picked up at least a couple of hundred billion dollars more--and three or four hundred is more likely--in additional spending.  I think he's considering that, and then looking down at the road at the 350 billion in remaining TARP funds that are going to be expended plus the stimulative effect of universal health insurance coverage, plus all the crazy shit the Fed has done and will do and he's decided that starting too small is self-correcting but starting too big is not. 

So yeah, Josh is right.  Having people take him at face value is integral to making the strategy work.  But, really, the only way there's a "may" in "he may have a plan" is if you assume he's Bush.   He's not.  That's the change we need to get used to.