Obama and the stimulus

It's still the early days of the Obama presidency, but Yogi Berra's line about Yankee Stadium's creeping shadows applies equally well to the White House — "It gets late early out there."

On the two-week anniversary of President Barack Obama's inauguration, the White House had hoped to make headlines by naming Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire to the post of commerce secretary. Instead, news of the Gregg appointment was buried by two more of the president's high-profile nominees — Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer — bowing out due to tax problems.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, Republicans beat back a measure to add $25 billion in infrastructure spending to the so-called stimulus bill, which Senate Democratic leaders conceded on Tuesday they did not have the votes to pass as it then stood. This would be the same stimulus bill that passed the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote, despite Mr. Obama's highly visible outreach efforts to the House GOP.

With a House bill rich in targets for critics, the distractions of botched appointments and presidential overtures to bipartisanship that have yet to bear tangible fruits, it looked this week as if Mr. Obama risked losing control of the narrative surrounding a piece of legislation of singular importance to his presidency.

Mr. Obama ceded some of this control voluntarily and from the start when he at least gave the appearance of leaving House Democrats to craft a bill of their own, based on broad campaign themes, before he took office. Publicly, the president has focused on stressing the bill's urgency and on achieving bipartisan support. But he has done little to enunciate and push for specific steps to stimulate the economy in the short term, or act as an effective salesman for those specific parts of the existing bill that he believes would do so.

Perhaps, as some have suggested, Mr. Obama resisted showing his hand so as to give himself room to triangulate between the more liberal House and more conservative Senate. If that was his strategy, the need to rethink it grew clearer as the week wore on. With most public-opinion polls suggesting that at least a plurality of Americans still supported the stimulus bill, reports from congressional offices had calls against the bill greatly outweighing those for it. In other words, the bill's critics had become more passionate than its supporters.

A president builds passion for a piece of legislation by giving the people something that's in it for them, and by letting those people know exactly what that something is. Those against the stimulus bill seemed to have a better handle on what's in it than those who are for it.

Mr. Obama still has a lot of political capital. In order to save the legislation upon which the success or failure of his presidency may rest — whether in the Senate or in the reconciliation process that follows — he may now have to spend some of that capital. With a presidential address on the economy scheduled for this coming Monday, he might consider putting himself out on a limb to demand specific actions to stimulate the economy and help those in economic peril, laying those actions out to the American people in unmistakable terms, and essentially daring the opposition to oppose them.

There's a steep learning curve to the presidency. And what the Obama team is learning the hard way is that sometimes the most effective route to bipartisan support does not run through the elected members of the opposition party but rather through their constituencies — who have the power to demand that their representatives vote a certain way, and must be convinced to use that power.