Over the course of the last 10 days or so, the drama surrounding the debate of the stimulus package has revealed a few things for us.
1) Obama firmly believes in Keynesian economic solutions.  I've said before that I'm not a big economic guy, I've only had one year in grad school, but I understand enough to break this down.  Basically there is a large group of economists (maybe 50-60%) who believe that in deep recessions or depressions, like the Great Depression, a major problem is a drop in Demand.  There is less spending, which leads to less jobs, which leads to even more decreased spending, etc.  They believe that the way the U.S. under FDR got out of the Great Depression was that FDR used government to increase Demand by increasing government spending.  The government employed people to bulid roads, infrastucture, etc thus making sure there were more people who had money to spend on goods (increasing Demand), which led to more people employed to make and sell those goods.  Obama's economic advisors, who are some of the top Establishment economists, Treausry Secretary and former head of the New York Fed Tim Geithner and Chief Ecnomic advisor and former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton Larry Summers are all in this large school of economists.  They are legitimately trying to fix the eocnomy.  I know there were some people who believed when the economic problems hit the media last fall that the Establishment was trying to deliberately just destroy the U.S. economy but that doesn't seem to be the case. 

2)  The overall Establishment/elite are confused about what to do.  When it came time for the bankers to get their bailout last fall, the elite were in lockstep.  The bankers said without the bailout the whole economy would crash, and Bush, Obama, and McCain fell in line to support and vote for the bailout.  This is not the case right now.  With no consensus from the bankers, the stimulus has fallen along partisan lines.  Because although 50-60% of economists believe FDR's increased federal spending turned around the Great Depression, a good 20-30% of eonomists think FDR prolonged the depression.  Government spending isn't free.  It takes away from the value of the dollar, it increases debt, and it slows down private investment that grows the economy more. (Think of it this way, if you have 100 workers working in a safe government job, or 100 workers competing in 4 companies with 25 workers apiece, who do you think is going to be more innnovative over ten years?)  Most of the economists who fall into this group are Republicans or libertarians.  So there is no elite consensus in this debate like there has been in big decisions in the past few years like the bailout last fall or going into Iraq.  But once again, people on both sides of the argument are trying to turn the economy around.  Republicans playing hardball on the stimulus aren't doing it because they think blocking the stimulus would crash the economy and that's what they want.  They legitimately believe that what Obama and that 50-60% majority of economists are calling for is the wrong thing and counterproductive.

3. Obama tried to be too cute and it backfired on him.  Obama is a natural as far as political skills, but he got beat down bad this past week.  He put together this gambit he thought was real clever.  He is a Keynsian economics guy, but he tried to take a Republican lean when negotiating the Stimulus package with Pelosi and the democrats in the House.  He thought that by doing this, and by wining and dining the Republicans, he could trick the Republicans into believing he was taking their side against Pelosi, and therefore get a lot of Republican votes for Obama's Stimulus proposal.  But what happened was, Obama pulled the Stimulus package more towards the Republicans, and away from what Pelosi and himself really wants, but the Republicans still didn't vote for it in the House.  Which meant that even though Obama already pulled the package more towards the Republicans, he still had to go to the Republicans senators on his knees begging for a few of them to cross over.  He finally got Specter, Snowe, and Collins to cross over, but only after cutting $100 billion of things from the package that by Keynesian economics are the best things to have to stimulate the economy.  So now a lot of Keynesian economists like the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman believe that the Stimulus package is too small to turn around the economy by Keynesian theory. (Of course their other motivation in saying that it is too small to work now is to cover their ass because it may not work simply because their economic theories about FDR getting us out of the Depression through government spending was simply wrong on its face and they don't want to have to admit it when this doesn't work)  But basically, Obama got his clock cleaned by the Republicans and they and the whole Establishment is less in awe of his political skills than they were two weeks ago.