So what will it be, Mr. Punch-it-through, or Mr. Bipartisan? Obama seems to be determined to give bipartisanship one more shot, hoping that his reasonableness will trump Republican obstruction.

Looked at together, President Obama's State of the Union Address last Wednesday and his appearance before the House Republican Caucus retreat in Baltimore on Friday offered a fascinating window on how Obama and his advisers believe an embattled president should lead in the face of wall-to-wall obstruction. Though the stance is high-minded and the words eloquent and heartfelt, the exercise fails as politics.

As so many of us writing for Huffington Post have been arguing for the past year, if President Obama did not cease behaving as the ally of Wall Street, the right wing would emerge as populist champion of the forgotten American. The election results in Massachusetts have now provided the exclamation point.

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more.

Much of the mainstream press has played the rising opposition to Senate confirmation of Ben Bernanke as a case of misplaced populist rage. The fact that the opposition within the Senate began with that chamber's left (Bernie Sanders) and right (Jim Bunning) seems to confirm the premise that it's only the fringe that opposes his [...]

President Obama's own instincts on how do deal with the economy seem to be somewhat better than those of his most senior advisers. At the White House jobs summit in December, he sounded less like Larry Summers or Tim Geithner and more like the man we heard on the campaign trail.

Should progressives in Congress hold their noses and vote for a badly bowdlerized health bill? Or should they vote down this bill, teach the corporate Democrats a lesson, spare the administration the voter backlash from an unpopular bill that has no public option and that raises taxes on decent worker health plans — and fight another day?

It was the best of Obama, it was the worst of Obama.

President Obama seemingly has two entirely incompatible tasks. One is to move the economy on a path toward faster recovery with increased stimulus spending. The other is to address the problem of rising deficits and the escalating long term public debt.

President Obama has announced a White House Jobs Summit for next month. At least that's the beginning of recognition that the unemployment rate is unacceptable. The measured rate is now 10.2 percent, but if you count people who have given up or who are involuntarily working part time, the real rate is over 17 percent.