Early victory???

The media, especially the Washington Post, are all in a twitter talking about the stimulus package and what a wonderful victory this was for Obama.

I have a couple of issues with this way of thinking:

1. The stimulus is not exactly a victory. At least it cannot be declared a victory yet. We have no idea if it will work. In fact, most economists, even the liberal ones are very leary about claiming this as a victory, when it appears to be nothing more than big government spending. There are few signs that this will bring any kind of sustained growth at all in our economy.

2. The world wide markets, even Wall Street, do not see this as a victory at all. Billions upon billions of dollars are supposed to be pumped into the markets in order to create sustained jobs and growth. Wall Streets reaction???? They dropped 100 points on the day this passed Congress. In fact, all of the markets were down. Instead of celebrating billions of dollars worth of new spending, the market have been sliding for the last month. This week alone, after finding out last weekend that the stimulus had the three Republicans it needed to pass this massive spending plan, the markets actually collapsed by 5%. Even though Obama rolled out his wonderful bank bailout this week to continue the rescue of banks, the market took a nosedive.

3 How can these goofs in the media claim this as a historic victory when Obama holds all the cards? Kind of easy to win a game when the Democrats are the only players in the game. When the people playing the game with you let you win and provide no push back whatsoever, well, uh, of course you win. Of course the stimulus passed, the Democrats control everything.

4. There was extremely little to no bipartisianship whatsoever. This would have been a sizeable victory if Obama could have gotten half the Republicans to support his package. After all, this is the change he promised. There are still plenty of wishy-washy Republicans in both the House and the Senate that would have supported this, if they felt even remotley like this would help the economy. There is no way this can be called bipartisian. In fact, Obama lost more Democrats than he gained of Republicans. 7 House Democrats voted no, 1 House Democrat voted present and he picked up 3 Senate Republican yes votes. Picked up 3 votes, lost 8 votes.

Really- how in heaven's name would this be considered a historic victory? Exactly what was expected to happen, did indeed happen.