Obama's First Presser...

Barack Obama held his first press conference this evening, and of course, the focus was on the stimulus package that will hopefully come up for a vote tomorrow.  My favorite part came in response to a question from conservative Mara Liasson, who asked what lessons the President has learned from this whole stimulus debate.  

Now, just in terms of the historic record here, the Republicans were brought in early and were consulted. And you'll remember that when we initially introduced our framework, they were pleasantly surprised and complimentary about the tax cuts that were presented in that framework. Those tax cuts are still in there. I mean, I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some, and then let them take credit for all of them. And maybe that's the lesson I learned.

But there was consultation. There will continue to be consultation. One thing that I think is important is to recognize that because all these -- all these items that you listed are hard, that people have to break out of some of the ideological rigidity and gridlock that we've been carrying around for too long.

And let me give you a prime example -- when it comes to how we approach the issue of fiscal responsibility. Again, it's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

It seems a lot of people who attack the President for his lack of bipartisanship always fail to mention that Obama initially had 40% of his stimulus going to tax cuts because that is precisely what Republicans wanted. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the GOP, railed against Obama's bill and proposed his own "plan", which portrayed Obama's plan as 100% spending, and then Rush demanded that 46% of the stimulus go to tax cuts.  

The Republican side of the debate looks as if it's based entirely in the realm of intellectual dishonesty.  God bless consistency.