Morning Must Reads

In what could produce serious heartburn for Democrats down the road, it seems that Harry Reid jumped out ahead of Nancy Pelosi on announcing the stimulus deal. It stopped the speaker from taking credit and, more importantly, prevented her from making some last-minute tweaks to school construction provisions.
Everybody has the story, but Glenn Thrush has the best details of just how awkward a moment it was for lawmakers on the Hill when House members found out that they were being stampeded on the conference bill. The Senate president should sleep with one eye open for a while.
“Even Senate Democrats seemed a little flummoxed. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), briefing reporters after the Reid presser, stopped short of actually saying he was 100 percent sure a deal had been cut. 

”There was general agreement,” he said. “It doesn’t mean everything is locked in yet. But if we didn’t have an agreement, then there wouldn’t have been a news conference.”

Bloomberg – Geithner Defends Lack of Details in Financial Plan

It was mostly rehash for the Treasury secretary on Capitol Hill Wednesday. But even as Tim Geithner was explaining why big, complicated, and vague was the way to go on the bank bailout, reporters Rebecca Christie and Rich Miller were finding out what investors would do.
They found that especially with a plan predicated on investor participation, Geithner may have miscalculated when he decided to go for a long, slow rollout. It may give markets time to derail his audacious plan. 
“The risk is that the reaction from investors sabotages the plan before it gets under way, forcing Geithner to change his approach in response — a position that his predecessor, Henry Paulson, frequently found himself in. That may mean the plan ‘may just end being an interim step,’ said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who’s now a professor at Harvard.”

New York Times – Obama’s Battle on Stimulus Shows Threats to His Agenda

Richard Stevenson stitches together in an analysis piece the gathering collective wisdom that the stimulus thrash really has been a defining moment for the Obama administration, not just a pit stop on the way to the president’s real agenda.
Stevenson is a little precious when he talks about the “loss of innocence” for Obama, who we know by now is no naïf. But he does outline how Obama’s decision to go fast and not build national consensus along the way will prove to be a fateful choice.
“In cobbling together a plan that could get through both the House and the Senate, Mr. Obama prevailed, but not in the way he had hoped. His inability to win over more than a handful of Republicans amounted to a loss of innocence, a reminder that his high-minded calls for change in the practice of governance had been ground up in a matter of weeks by entrenched forces of partisanship and deep, principled differences between left and right.”

Daily Telegraph –Pakistan will be a stern test of Washington’s ‘smart power’

With Richard Holbrooke taking his first trip as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dean Nelson explains exactly what is stake as Holbrooke and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton start flexing their “smart power” in the region.
Nelson found that the already maddening inaction and double dealing of the region will probably intensify as the Clinton team begins looking to direct very specific policy changes in the uneasy nation of Pakistan
“Mr Holbrooke is expected to support a new approach which will involve more Pakistani aerial bombardment of militant havens, the creation of a new elite police force to move in and control the regained territory, more aid for education, and secret talks with “persuadable” Taliban leaders and allies in Afghanistan, such as former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to help them switch sides.
It’s the first big test for the “smart power” Hilary Clinton outlined in the Senate when she was confirmed as secretary of state.”

George Will – Runaway Stimulus

Will neatly sums up the notion held by many on both sides of the aisle that the stimulus plan was too big to move as fast as he did.
Yes speed kills, but not always your opponent.
“Not yet a third of the way through the president’s “first 100 days,” he and we should remember that it was not FDR’s initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase “100 days” into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon’s frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.”