It's of course unwise to generalize public opinion from a couple calls on C-SPAN. That said, I'm going to boldy do it anyway. Welcome to the blogosphere. No one understands what the stimulus is. In part, that's because it's not any one thing: It's a vast collection of programs connected by nothing but the fact that they all cost money. Maybe for that reason, the Obama team has preferred to define the stimulus in terms of what it will achieve. We've heard a lot about the three million jobs it will create but much less about the nature and composition of the package. The message has been simple. Stimulus: Just do it. The Republicans, sensibly, stepped into the void and began aggressively defining the package. Suddenly it was pork and STD prevention and mob museums and amusement parks. Rather than the sum of its parts they explained the eccentricities of its margins. But they were essentially alone in giving memorable examples of what exactly the stimulus looked like in practice. They're still largely alone in that pursuit. But rather than Eric Cantor and John Boehner picking the examples, Arlen Specter and Susan Collins have taken up the task. Their cuts have elevated on another concrete set of the stimulus's component parts. But this time, it's not mob museums and contraceptive funding. Cutting a hundred billion dollars required digging into the meat of the program. And so attention has suddenly focused on a whole other set of stimulus priorities: School construction, education funding, and aid to states. These are, to put it mildly, rather more popular. The callers this morning were outraged that these priorities would be cut. Why wouldn't you fast track school construction right now? And if those provisions were considered the bill's least necessary, then presumably the rest of the bill is arguably even worthier. This would seem a great gift to the Democrats who can now campaign for schools and state services -- potholes! -- rather than some $900 billion expenditure hazily-defined as stimulus. The question, I guess, is whether they take advantage of it.
