Obama's stimulus bill, wiles, & defense mechanisms

Even though Obama only needs a few republican senators to support the stimulus bill, he's trying to get at least 20. In courting them he's ditched a lot of healthy ideas and included steak brownies instead (that's what republicans eat). Angry liberals argue that Obama is fetishizing bipartisanship or wimpy. Right wing bloggers have another theory:

[I]f Obama buys significant Republican support for his bill, Republicans will own the deficits, tax hikes and intervention, as well. The stimulus bill will be for Republicans what the Iraq war was for Democrats - a policy they first supported, then regretted, then tripped over themselves to explain.... Obama doesn't want bipartisan support, so much as he wants political immunization.

(Conservatives, unlike liberals, tend to assume that Obama is a Harvard JD and not someone who won a school-wide MLK Day essay contest last year by arguing that it should be illegal to make people cry.)

There's support for the evil genius theory deep inside Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Barney Frank. In Frank's words:

“[Obama] was being conciliatory [by supporting the Wall Street bailout], because he thinks it’s very important for us, both in public policy and politically, that we don’t get blamed for fucking up the economy.”

This is good for democrats but bad for the economy. How could Obama, the anti-bifurcation crusader, straddler of aisles, verbalizer of happenings such as "we play baseball in blue states and have gay sex in the red states," sell out the common good for politics?

The same way all those ministers, politicians, and my mom have secret gay sex and then argue against gayness in public. It is a psychological process called reaction formation, "in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration (hypertrophy) of the directly opposing tendency."