Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:20 PM by Gene

Oh dear oh dear:

Trillion dollar legislation doesn't come along every day, and the hard choices are not just what we spend money on but how, at what speed, towards which priorities. Is getting a bad bill quickly really worth it? Is taking more time to get it right really so risky?

I would not put it past this president and his team to have calculated that this engorged House bill was precisely what the system would yield; that the Republicans would oppose it out of both principle and politics; that there would come a moment, once all the Old Bulls had had their say, for the New President to ride in to the rescue, and actually fulfill his promise of Change We Can Believe In by turning this into a Bill We Can Actually Live With. Maybe he is building to a denouement, when a president who promised to make hard decisions takes a sprawling bill that tries to do so many things at once and performs some highly public sacrifices of some Democratic sacred cows. And by so doing, shows who's really in charge of leading America out of these dark times.

If that's the way this goes, he will have earned a hat as big as Texas. But if he keeps saying the right things while Washington keeps doing the wrong things, he will be worse than a passive leader: he will be the one who, with all the energies and hope he unleashed, brought the Democrats back to power, broke the legislative log jam, and drowned us all.

And who, pray tell, helped elect him with halos?