Poll: Confidence in stimulus plan ebbs

The Republicans made it their mission, these past several months, to trash the stimulus plan as wasteful, and too expensive. The Democratic counteroffensive? Non-existent, as far as we know.

This plays into a larger pattern that I've been writing about. A desire by the Obama administration to go it alone. They don't believe that they need allies in order to win, or to sustain a past victory. During the battle over passage of the stimulus package, even when it started looking bad, no one from the administration asked for our help, or the collective help of the blogosphere, as far as I know. As a reader of ours noted at the time, could you imagine a Republican administration not asking for the help of right-wing talk radio and FOX News on of the most important pieces of legislation of their presidency? Similarly on health care - the blog outreach has been non-existent from the administration. It is only their most important piece of legislation these four years, other than the stimulus package.

This administration believes in political autarky, and has elevated "going it alone" almost to a religion. They not only don't seek the help of the left, they seem somewhat turned off by the very existence of the political left, of progressives, and even, as we've seen, of the gays - of any Democrat to the left of Joe Lieberman.

And that is why, I think, they're now having problems with public support for the stimulus. There's a level of hubris involved. They know they're right, and they know they're smarter than you. So they don't think they need anyone else's help to win, and they don't need anyone else's help to maintain that victory after the fact. At its most basic level, they don't think they need friends and allies, at least not friends on the left. And as a result, we may already be watching their legacy begin to unravel.

Hopefully they can keep the upper hand on the stimulus and on health care reform. But the notion that they insist on doing so without friends remains troubling.