but seriously the NYT OPED is calling for him to withdraw, more business as usual comments on his lobbying without the title and tax failures,

that combined with the 17 waivers Obama has issued in less than 17 days for lobbyists to work there, I know BTD you arent big on that, but Obama was..

I vividly remember the debates when he and Edwards went after Hill for lobbying ties yada yada yada....Obama himself made it a centerpiece and now it is biting him IMO

It will be the epitome of hypocrisy if you let him slide on this and then there will be no real distinction between him and Bush.

There are probably many reasons why Obama is so caught up with the partisan deal.  One could be that he is obsessed with trying to emulate FDR, and Lincoln.  Maybe the bill just won't mean that much to him if it gets through only with democrats voting since he preached the bipartisanship theory over and over again during the primaries and the election campaign and he is obsessed with getting it done his way.

Another reason could be for political cover.  If the bill fails he wants a majority of the republicans to be on board so that way he  can later say:

You just can't blame the democrats for the bills failure.

I fault those people and the media, who never pinned Obama down on any specifics. The debates are nothing more than infomercials. People need to insist on answers. (I personally couldn't ask the questions and I also couldn't insist on an answer).  

Obama's mistake was in not confining his message of change to the larger ideological issues, and to the specific issues that had plagued us in the Bush years; he went to the next level and promised ethical changes - and those declarations were in pretty much every stump speech he gave.  People voted, in large measure, for that kind of change.

Now, maybe people should not have allowed themselves to be sucked into believing it, but the fault is not the people who believed, it's the person who made the promises.  So far, anyway, it seems like the strongest of the believers are not giving up and are finding reasons to justify why it's okay that Obama's already broken most of the promises he made, but where Obama loses is with the people who took a leap of faith - the independents, those who just voted party lines, those who held their noses when they touched the screen - and now feel like they had the rug pulled out from under them.  I would bet that could be a significant chunk of what constitutes a president's approval ratings - at a time when the Congress should be riding that wave in their effort to carry out the legislative agenda.

And I think Obama's even bigger mistake was in not having a coordinated, everyone-on-message, focused, stimulus plan with bullet-points that summarized the elements, their costs, their projected benefits and a timeline.  Something that looked like a finished product and not a work in progress.  Something that looked like the collective brilliant economic minds on his staff had gone all-in to put it together - with the input and cooperation of Democratic leaders.

He failed the vetting test, in a pretty big way.  And he failed the explanation for why it didn't matter.  I was sickened this morning listening to the talk about the deference being given to and the reverence being accorded Daschle by Senate Democrats - he's one of their own, after all, and it appears they just could not be prouder.  Really.  What a guy.  

But, wait!  There's more!  

Tom Daschle backed the patron who paid him a million-dollar salary and supplied him with a free car and driver for a job inside the Obama administration, two Democrats said Monday.

Leo Hindery, whose InterMedia Partners employed the former Senate majority leader, had been mentioned as a possible secretary of commerce or U.S. trade representative.

"Tom was pushing for him," said one Democratic source.

Obama's aides rejected Daschle's suggestion that a top job go to Hindery, for whose private equity fund Daschle had served as a rainmaker and adviser.

Jenny Backus, who has been helping to shepherd Daschle through his confirmation process for the administration, declined to comment on discussions about a job for Hindery.

But the news that Daschle did not pay taxes on the imputed income for the car and driver has put the spotlight on Hindery, a blustery, left-leaning mogul with an office in Chrysler Building, a table at the Four Seasons, and a passion for race cars, who has styled himself as organized labor's Robert Rubin.

BTD is right in assigning blame (if there's blame to be had) to the folks who credulously pushed the "change" idea as if it were something, like, new.  Frankly, I also think the media got a little wrapped up in that same idea, it wasn't just the fans.  Now they're skeptical, but I think they might have fallen down on the job just a teeny bit during the campaign.

Obama has brought some real change, at least so far, and that's his determination to accommodate the opposition.  BTD suggests he's now free to give up on that (since the Republicans voted en masse against stimulus) but I doubt that's going to happen in the short run.  I don't believe Obama ever believed that the Republicans would come around overnight.  I think his strategy is compounded of equal parts actually believing the post-partisan unity shtick and a longer outlook than just the first few weeks of his Administration.