The briefing room was packed with reporters eager to feel out the administration's new mouthpiece, after two sometimes-contentious years of dealing with Robert Gibbs, who departed last week.

The Times has the blow-by-blow, and below is video from the Washington Post's website.

Gibbs' departure left a lot of questions in the White House press shop, but one of them was answered today, when Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton--a Buffalo native recently floated as a Democratic candidate for Chris Lee's vacant seat--announced he'd leave the White House to start a consulting firm.

Emanuel looked at it, checked it out for a second, and then opened the wrapping paper — old copies of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times — to find that inside was a dead fish.

"This is a dead fish," he said to his staffers. 

What could Rahm make of this enigmatic gesture? Is it some sort of "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes" scenario involving one of his enemies? 

Apparently not. The fish was an Asian Carp, the bloodthirsty monster that's been terrorizing Chicago waterways for years. And this Asian Carp, tucked into the Windy City's rival newspapers, was very much dead. Perhaps there was some meaning in the gift, after all. 

"In Chicago," Gibbs said, "this is how friends say goodbye."

There are a few things about Gibbs that irritate even the least excitable reporters in the briefing room, though none of them would speak for the record out of fear of retaliation. One reporter expressed frustration with the way Gibbs has compared reporters -- and even Sen. John McCain -- to his 6-year-old son because he didn't approve of the way they were behaving. "He uses him as a prop," the reporter said. Unlike press secretaries past, who would make rounds of calls to reporters as they neared deadlines, Gibbs is notoriously tough to get on the phone. His soliloquies are full of "first and foremost" and "I will say this," and he relies on escape-hatch promises to "check and get back to you."

"Check and get back to you" being, of course, the press secretary equivalent of "we'll see what your mother says."

So, with Mr. Massa quickly becoming a darling of the right, the White House made a preemptive television appearance this morning. "Well look, I think this whole story is ridiculous," press secretary Robert Gibbs said on Good Morning America. "I think the latest excuse is silly and ridiculous."

"Let's go through what we've heard from Congressman Massa. Last week on Wednesday, he was having a recurrence of cancer. On Thursday he was guilty of using salty language. On Friday we learned he's before the Ethics Committee to be investigated on sexual harassment."

As for Rahm Emanuel Week? "The president is not focused on palace intrigue. It says something about this town that this goes for entertainment," Mr. Gibbs said.

So what about "The Daily Show"?

"I think the President would love to, just maybe not Colbert." He went on to explain:"I have yet to see a politician best Stephen Colbert in an interview on his show," Gibbs said, laughing. "I mean, he's really, really good."

Perhaps someone should have told Harold Ford Jr. that.

"I take this very seriously," Representative Peter King said on Good Morning America today. Mr. King accused the White House of "stonewalling" his efforts to investigate how the infamous Salehi couple got into that state dinner, by subpoenaing Social Secretary Desiree Rogers. But the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee said it wasn't personal with Ms. Rogers. But it is personal with press secretary Robert Gibbs, who Mr. King thinks is being "kind of a wise guy" for mocking his interest in the matter.

"I don't think even Peter King would have the audacity to in some way put the Salahis in the trifecta of Watergate, 9/11 or some of the financial dealings," Mr. Gibbs told reporters yesterday morning.

"The only audacity I have is the audacity of hope that the White House will be honest, and so far, they're not being honest on this issue," Mr. King said this morning.

For House Democrats, whose ’10 campaigns will succeed or fail based on the public’s confidence in Obama, it’s essential that voters feel the economy is improving —significantly — by Election Day. The White House, though, is free to take a slightly longer view. Sure, Democratic losses in ’10 wouldn’t be helpful, but for Obama, the real target date is November 6, 2012.

These conflicting senses of urgency are now coming into focus. On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the press that she might be receptive to a second stimulus bill, to supplement the $787 billion package passed by Congress last month. David Obey, her loyal lieutenant and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, then announced that his staff was already at work on a follow-up stimulus program (although he made clear that there are no imminent plans to formally introduce it).

Pelosi and Obey and many of their Democratic colleagues are acting on fears that the first stimulus bill, watered down by compromise, won’t be adequate to get the job done—an argument that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been advancing, and one that was impressed on Pelosi and other top Democrats in a meeting with economists on Tuesday.  

By this line of thinking, the current stimulus will have only a marginal impact on the economy, creating or saving—under the best-case scenario—3.5 millions jobs. With more than four million jobs already lost and 610,000 disappearing last month alone, this would probably leave unemployment at or near 10 percent at the end of 2010.

For House Democrats from potentially competitive districts, this is a particularly unnerving prospect. Surely, the example of 1982, when unemployment crossed 10 percent at the end of September and voters responded by throwing out more than two dozen of Ronald Reagan’s Republican allies in the House, has crossed their minds. If the forecasts of Krugman and his colleagues are accurate, then losses—possibly severe losses—for Democrats in next year’s midterm elections will be almost unavoidable.

And while their party’s majority is too big to be threatened in ’10, even safe-seat Democrats have reason to dread Republican gains, which would make it much easier for the House G.O.P. to slow the Democrats’ agenda in 2011 and 2012 and which could bring Republicans within striking distance of control of the chamber in the ’12 elections.

It’s not surprising, then, that House Democrats are increasingly agitating for a second stimulus, one that (in theory) would supplement the original with millions of new jobs—enough to convince the country by the fall of 2010 that Obama’s economic policies are working and to stifle any popular sentiment that it’s “time to send the president a message.”

But the odds aren’t good that they’ll get their way, mainly because the White House doesn’t see a second stimulus as a fight worth waging.

Any new stimulus, the administration realizes, would face far more opposition than the first one, which was passed with almost no Republican support (and even a handful of Democratic defections). The first time around, voters were willing to ignore the G.O.P.’s feigned outrage over explosive spending, mainly because they grasped the severity of the situation, believed in Obama, and wanted the new president to get his way on his first major initiative.

The dynamics would change in round two. Republicans would find the public far more receptive to their spending attacks—particularly after absorbing the recent uproar over the earmark-happy omnibus spending bill and especially if the administration seeks more bailout money. Obama’s push for a $3.7 trillion budget filled with tax hikes and new spending programs won’t help either. To ask for a second stimulus on top of all of this would invite moderate-to-conservative deficit hawk Democrats in the House who went along with the first one to break with Obama—both for philosophical reasons and to curry favor with their swing district constituents.

Beside the budget fight that will bog him down for the next few months, Obama is expected to unveil a comprehensive plan to address the banking system. And he also wants to make health care legislation a priority. All of this will require a considerable investment of time, energy and, most importantly, political capital.

This probably explains why Robert Gibbs, Obama’s spokesman, had this to say about the second stimulus idea this week: “The president and his economic team believe that the steps we took will have a concrete impact on getting our economy moving again. The focus throughout this administration is doing all that we can to move the spending that’s been authorized by Congress.”

Maybe Obama, in his heart of hearts, would like to have a second stimulus (or would simply have liked the first one to be much bigger). But he doesn’t want to subordinate the rest of his ambitious agenda to what would be a draining and costly fight over another stimulus. Better to take what we got, work on the budget, and hope the banking plan—when it’s finally announced—gets the markets moving again, seems to be the White House’s way of thinking.

Like House Democrats, Obama and his team are probably mindful of 1982 as well. Sure, Reagan’s party paid a price for the awful economy in those midterms, but when the economy turned around in 1983 and 1984, it was Reagan who reaped all of the political benefits.

"You know," Gibbs said, "there's a conventional wisdom to what's going on in America via Washington, and there's the reality of what's happening in America."

The cynical interpretation of this statement would be that President Obama is merely resorting to the time-honored tradition of media bashing—his own variation of Spiro Agnew's timeless attack on the "nattering nabobs of negativism." Jonathan Martin, a former National Review staffer who now writes for Politico, made exactly this case a few days ago.

"Pitting Washington Insiders against Real People, as Obama and his top aides have increasingly done in recent weeks, is often a refuge for presidents who have suffered missteps or drawn critical coverage, particularly in their early weeks in office," Martin wrote.

In this case, though, such cynicism calls to mind Harry Truman's old retort that "I'm not giving them hell—I'm just telling the truth and they think it's hell." Gibbs wasn't actually engaging in defensive spin—he was making an accurate observation that was taken as defensive spin.

Fresh evidence of this emerged on Thursday, in a new Associated Press poll. Asked to assess how much Obama had done to cooperate with Republicans in Congress, 62 percent of respondents said that he'd done "about the right amount," while another 6 percent said he'd done too much. At the same time, 64 percent said that Congressional Republicans had done "not enough" to cooperate with the president.

These numbers, on top of numerous recent surveys that have found remarkable durability in Obama's popularity, seem to validate Gibbs' main point, since so much airtime has been handed over this past month to the Congressional G.O.P.'s concerted assault on Obama's stimulus package and his governing style. And, all too often, D.C.-based news outlets, particularly the national cable networks, have used the G.O.P. attacks to frame their stories about Obama's presidency, highlighting the partisan rancor in the House and Senate and the supposed end of Obama's honeymoon.

Since Obama's inauguration, a pattern has emerged. The new president, in word and action, has reached out to Republicans. He feted John McCain with a dinner the night before he was sworn in, paid a visit on the House Republican Conference in the U.S. House, met individually with Republican senators interested in crafting a stimulus compromise, and even invited a freshman Republican House member to fly with him on Air Force One to an event at a Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Illinois.

The Republicans, with the exception of three senators, have responded with words—but no action. Their campaign against the stimulus relied on over-the-top and often misleading demagoguery and, when Obama and the Democrats refused to accede to their every wish, they responded with a campaign to discredit the process—and the president.

"If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country's screwed," cried Senator Lindsey Graham. "I know bipartisanship when I see it. I've participated in it. I've gone back home and gotten primary opponents because I wanted to be bipartisan. There's nothing about this process that's been bipartisan. This is not ‘change we can believe in.'"

When the stimulus package cleared the House for the final time (without a single Republican vote), John Boehner, the House Republican Leader, railed that "All the talk about bipartisanship that we have heard over the last several months went down the drain."

Republicans, of course, are free to pursue this strategy. The problem is that much of the media, from the moment the G.O.P. began objecting, has behaved as if these protests are registering with the masses—hence the endless declarations on all of the cable news channels that Obama's honeymoon is over.

By far, though, the prevailing attitude in the D.C.-based media was best expressed by NBC's Chuck Todd, who actually asked Gibbs if Obama would veto his own stimulus bill because it didn't attract significant Republican support. That was only a few days after Obama was sworn-in, but it set the mood perfectly for what was to come.

To watch the coverage of the stimulus debate on cable news was to be overwhelmed by an army of Republican talking heads, each spouting the same talking points about Obama's failure to live up to his promises of bipartisanship. But the polling data seems clearer by the day: This is not the conversation most Americans are having. Overwhelmingly, they are satisfied with Obama's efforts to bridge the partisan gap. In the A.P. poll, just 30 percent of respondents said Obama wasn't doing enough to work with Republicans. Tellingly, this is the exact same number of respondents who identified themselves as Republicans. Among independents, support for Obama and his style remains very high.

Granted, if Obama's popularity does plummet one of these days, Gibbs' official response will almost certainly involve blaming the media in some way. But when you're right, you're right—and right now, Gibbs' argument is pretty sound.

"You know," Gibbs said, "there's a conventional wisdom to what's going on in America via Washington, and there's the reality of what's happening in America."

The cynical interpretation of this statement would be that President Obama is merely resorting to the time-honored tradition of media bashing - his own variation of Spiro Agnew's timeless attack on the "nattering nabobs of negativism." Jonathan Martin, a former National Review staffer who now writes for Politico, made exactly this case a few days ago.

"Pitting Washington Insiders against Real People, as Obama and his top aides have increasingly done in recent weeks, is often a refuge for presidents who have suffered missteps or drawn critical coverage, particularly in their early weeks in office," Martin wrote.

In this case, though, such cynicism calls to mind Harry Truman's old retort that "I'm not giving them hell - I'm just telling the truth and they think it's hell." Gibbs wasn't actually engaging in defensive spin - he was making an accurate observation that was taken as defensive spin.

Fresh evidence of this emerged on Thursday, in a new Associated Press poll. Asked to assess how much Obama had done to cooperate with Republicans in Congress, 62 percent of respondents said that he'd done "about the right amount," while another six percent said he'd done too much. At the same time, 64 percent said that congressional Republicans had done "not enough" to cooperate with the president.

These numbers, on top of numerous recent surveys that have found remarkable durability in Obama's popularity, seem to validate Gibbs' main point, since so much air time has been handed over this past month to the congressional G.O.P.'s concerted assault on Obama's stimulus package and his governing style. And, all too often, D.C.-based news outlets, particularly the national cable networks, have used the G.O.P. attacks to frame their stories about Obama's presidency, highlighting the partisan rancor in the House and Senate and the supposed end of Obama's honeymoon.

Read the rest.