In terms of urban policy, the Obama administration certainly will not be lacking input from New Yorkers. With new appointments announced today in Washington, it doesn’t escape notice that now the three voices with probably the most influence on urban affairs nationally are officials from New York.

That’s no insignificant step, given that the Obama administration has repeatedly made clear that urban areas will get fresh attention. On everything from transportation policy to housing laws and incentives, cities have long complained about receiving the short end of the stick from Washington, with suburbs grabbing the spotlight. At least among urban affairs wonks, there is a feeling that the Obama administration will change that, given his rhetoric in the campaign and early appointments (as well as the president's own big-city background).

Urban policy appointees from New York, so far:

• Shaun Donovan, the city’s former housing commissioner, has a highly influential seat as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• Derek Douglas, the director of New York State’s Washington, D.C., advocacy office under governors Spitzer and Paterson, will be the special assistant for Urban Affairs to President Barack Obama.

• Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion will be the White House director of Urban Affairs. Bruce Katz, who heads up urban policy at the Brookings Institution and has been advising the Obama administration on this position, last week described his vision of Mr. Carrion’s new office as a somewhat bureaucratic position, meant to help coordination across various relevant federal departments. Those agencies can often act in silos, he said at an NYU forum in New York, and can contradict each other on urban policies.

The Obama administration just sent out a series of releases that provide details about how money from the stimulus package--the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--will impact job growth in individual states and congressional districts.

According to the numbers, New York State will gain about 215,000 jobs--more than most states, fewer than California (396,000) and Texas (269,000).

Among New York's congressional districts, it's the 8th, represented by Jerry Nadler, that is estimated to get the most  jobs--8,100. That may have something to do with the district's planned Fulton Street Transit Center, which the M.T.A. has said will recieve about $500 million in stimulus funds.

Other districts on the top end of scale are Brooklyn's 12th, represented by Nydia Velazquez, and the Hudson Valley's district 19, represented by John Hall.

The district assigned the lowest estimate is the 28th, which covers Rochester and Niagara Falls, is represented by Louise Slaughter expected to gain 6,700 jobs.

Other districts in the low range are several in Western New York (the 27th, 25th and 24th), a couple in the outer boroughs of New York City (the 10th and 16th), both the 4th and 5th, which cover Long Island just east of the city and Westchester's 18th district.

On Sunday's Meet the Press, David Gregory confronted David Axelrod, one of President Obama's chief advisers, with a respected economist's grim conclusion that the stimulus package Obama will sign on Tuesday simply isn't big enough and that the unemployment rate will hover around 10 percent at the end of 2010.

"You heard people saying it was too small, you had people saying it was too large," Axelrod replied. "We believe it's where it should be."

That might be wishful thinking. As Gregory pointed out, the economy is currently underperforming by nearly $3 trillion; a stimulus package worth one-quarter of that surely won't hurt, but it raises the possibility that, when they focus on the '10 midterm election 18 months or so from now, Americans will judge the stimulus plan a failure—and take out their frustration on Obama's party.

But in a way, we've traveled this road before. The parallels between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama—in terms of their appeal, their style and the circumstances under which they won office, not their ideologies—are many, and the example of Reagan's first term offers a guide to the political roller coaster Obama may be in for.

Reagan, like Obama, rode to office on the strength of his personality (and with a devoted grass-roots following among his party's true believers) at a time of economic gloom, international turmoil and sagging national confidence. And as with Obama, Reagan's lopsided victory prompted forecasts of the other party's long-term demise. Before the 1980 election, Republicans were seen as a permanent minority party, on Capitol Hill and across the country. After it, they controlled the White House and the Senate and had pulled within 26 seats of a House majority.

Reagan's prescription for the country's domestic woes involved massive tax cuts, which—aided by his surprisingly durable (Obama-like, it might be said) popularity—he pushed through Congress in the first half of 1981. Meanwhile, Democratic Congressional leaders fared miserably in polls and, for the first time ever, surveys showed as many voters calling themselves Republicans as Democrats.

By the summer of '81, Republicans were openly forecasting even bigger gains for their party in the 1982 midterm elections. A swing of just 26 House seats would put the G.O.P. in charge, and with redistricting shifting 17 Northeast seats to the G.O.P.-friendly Sun Belt, Republicans figured they were already at least halfway there. And in the Senate, where Republicans already held a 54-46 advantage, Democrats would have to defend 19 seats in '82, compared to only 13 for Republicans, numbers that made Republican gains almost inevitable.

Roughly speaking, Democrats are in the same spot right now. Their president's popularity seems invulnerable, while Congressional Republicans struggle to amass a 30 percent approval rating. Voters are abandoning the G.O.P. in droves. And the midterm election outlook is awfully rosy for Democrats, who, like Republicans 28 years ago, are already forecasting unprecedented gains.

It would be wise, then, for Democrats to remember what happened after Reagan won passage of his signature economic program: Things got worse—much worse—and the G.O.P. paid dearly for it.

In the fall of 1981, a few months after Reagan's tax cut program became law, the country plunged into an ugly recession. Unemployment, high to begin with, began climbing. Reagan pointed to some encouraging signs, like a dip in inflation and growth in the stock market, but his words fell on deaf ears. Americans were losing their jobs and there seemed to be no end in sight. So much for those tax cuts.

In the first week of October 1982, just a month before the midterm elections, the unemployment rate surpassed the 10 percent mark. Charles Manatt, then the Democratic national chairman, called it "a new threshold of disaster" that would end whatever remained of the public's patience with Reagan's program. The working-class "Reagan Democrats" who had keyed the president's '80 triumph were in open revolt.

"The blue-collar worker is what Reagan was talking about, and a lot of them were still working when he was here," one Michigan worker told The Washington Post that October. "But he would get a different reception today. He promised more work, and look what's happened."

Edgar Fiedler, an economist who had previously served Presidents Ford and Nixon, offered this assessment: "There is little doubt that the public Reaganomics has failed."

In that climate, the task for Congressional Democrats was easy. They embraced their opposition status and framed the '82 election on the new president and his policies. On Election Day, Democrats picked up 27 House seats and, despite having to defend far more turf, held Republicans to no gains in the Senate. They also radically expanded their control of State Houses across the country. Exit polls found that one-third of Reagan's voters from 1980 cast ballots for Democrats in the '82 midterms. And of the 40 percent of the '82 electorate that cited unemployment as their top issues, 68 percent voted Democratic.

What's interesting is that, even as the economy and his job performance ratings tanked in 1982, Reagan was still viewed warmly by voters on a personal level. It's not hard to imagine something similar happening with Obama next year, should his stimulus package—and any subsequent recovery efforts—not produce an obvious payoff.

But there's another political lesson in Reagan's first-term story, one that is generally lost in the hagiography that surrounds his legacy.

Initially, the '82 election results were thought to represent a resurgence of the New Deal and Great Society liberalism that had been declared dead in the wake of Reagan's '80 victory. The Democratic establishment latched on to this theory, stifling reform voices within the party and behaving as if the old way of doing things was back in vogue. It was in this climate that Walter Mondale emerged as the party's 1984 presidential nominee.

But they were very, very wrong. Unemployment began to drop in 1983 and Reagan's poll numbers began to rise. How much credit Reagan actually deserved for this recovery can be debated, but is irrelevant here; people had always wanted to like him, so it was easy for them to give him all the credit. By the time the '84 election rolled around, it was an epic mismatch, a beloved president whose bold policies had (supposedly) triggered a stunning recovery running against a tired product of the Democratic machine that had been repudiated four years earlier. Reagan's 49-state landslide was thusly born.

In the end, 1980 was every bit the transformational election that it was labeled at the time. For the next three decades, Reagan's small-government philosophy retained broad popular support. The '82 election was merely a hiccup. But not until Bill Clinton came along in 1992 did Democrats seem to appreciate the political significance of this.

Something similar may be at work now. There's every reason to believe that last year's election represents the end of the Reagan consensus, the moment when the government-is-our-enemy mantra became, once again, a fringe property. But Republicans, like the Democrats of the early '80s, show no signs of recognizing the transformation that's taking place. If they end up faring well next year, they're likely to misinterpret the results just as profoundly as Democrats did in 1982. And that is the recipe for a drubbing in 2012.

Democrats are still in good shape to win Judd Gregg's New Hampshire Senate seat in 2010, despite the Republican's abrupt withdrawal on Thursday as Barack Obama's nominee for Commerce secretary.

As it now stands, Gregg will return to the Senate and serve out the remainder of his third term, which expires after the 2010 election. This means that Gregg's former aide, 63-year-old Bonnie Newman, who had been tapped to serve as his successor, will not get to serve in the Senate after all. But since Newman had pledged not to run for it herself, competition for the seat should remain as wide open as it was before Gregg's announcement.

That said, the 61-year-old lawmaker didn't quite slam the door shut on seeking a fourth term next year, something that would significantly alter the dynamics of the race. In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Gregg said that he would "probably not" be a candidate next year, and in a conference call earlier in the day he said he didn't "intend" to and that "sometimes, there's other things to do in life." There are two ways to read this.

Maybe Gregg is being sincere, and the seeming imprecision of his language doesn't mean anything. After all, he had been perfectly willing to leave the Senate for a less-than-glamorous cabinet post—when F.D.R. had to offer Henry Wallace something, anything, after kicking him off the Democratic ticket in 1944, he made him Commerce secretary—in a Democratic administration. He would have been invisible in the job and Republicans wouldn't have forgotten his "betrayal;" there would be no post-administration career in elected politics for Gregg.

Add in the fact that it was Gregg who initially approached the Obama administration (at least that was White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' claim on Thursday), and a picture emerges of Gregg as a restless senator, a man looking to move on to a new challenge or out of politics altogether—not a guy who might now turn around and seek another six years in the Senate.

But come on: When a politician has an opportunity to make a Sherman-esque statement and opts not to, it almost always means something. At the very least, Gregg seems to be trying to leave himself enough wiggle room in case, say, six months from now he decides he's got nothing better to do than run again. Or maybe he already knows that he wants to run again, but thinks it would look better if he seems to reach that conclusion gradually.

Changes of heart like this aren't entirely unprecedented. One of the more famous examples came in 1995, when South Boston Congressman Joe Moakley, then the chairman of the House Rules Committee, informed the Bay State delegation and ambitious politicians in his district that he would retire after the 1996 election. He scheduled a press conference to make the announcement, but when the moment came—with television stations carrying it live—Moakley stepped to the microphone and declared: "Contrary to my primary inclination, I am not retiring. I still intend to seek reelection, and I intend to be here fighting, kicking, scratching to keep those programs I helped put in years ago." He stayed in the House until his death in 2001.

Why might Gregg, despite his evident fatigue with the Senate, decide to stick around? Maybe he'll realize there really aren't that many things that he wants to do in life. New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg realized this almost immediately after announcing he'd leave the Senate in 2000. His retirement proved miserable, and when he was given the chance to return in 2002—thanks to Bob Torricelli's implosion—he jumped at it.

Or maybe his family will encourage him to run again. (It was actually Moakley's wife who insisted that he abandon his retirement plans back in '95.) Gregg's fellow Senate Republicans, already facing a challenging national battleground in '10, might also see him as their best chance to hold on to a seat from New Hampshire and urge him on.

If Gregg does ultimately run, his fate will largely hinge on how much political damage the Commerce episode causes. Before he was nominated for the post, Gregg was in decent shape for 2010. New Hampshire has shifted dramatically toward Democrats in recent years, but it remains a very winnable state for the right Republican in the right year.

Gregg, the son of a former governor and himself a former governor and congressman, is a well-known commodity to most Granite State voters. His family's reputation and his low-key image have kept him fairly popular with the independent voters who used to swing New Hampshire elections to Republicans but who are now voting Democratic. A University of New Hampshire poll last summer showed Gregg with a 52-23 percent favorable rating. It seemed unlikely that Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes, who is now running for Gregg's seat (and who is probably the strongest Democratic candidate besides Governor John Lynch, who doesn't seem interested in running), would challenge Gregg.

But Gregg will pay a price for his sudden Senate withdrawal. Independent voters who view Obama favorably may see the move as something akin to sabotage. Many will wonder why Gregg, who cited the basic incompatibility between his and Obama's philosophy in his withdrawal, put the new administration and the public through such a drama in the first place. His initial refusal to take the post without a guarantee that a Republican would be nominated to replace him left a bad taste with voters, too.

But there is time for these feelings to ebb. Republicans may have been miffed that he would team up with a Democratic president, but he can win them back by showing partisan loyalty in the Senate in the months ahead. If his overall poll ratings don't decline too much, New Hampshire Republicans, however unenthusiastically, would probably rally around him, sensing that he'd be their best choice to win in '10. He'll have to hope that the rest of the electorate simply moves on to other things.

The best bet is that, for one reason or another, Gregg will ultimately stay on the sidelines in 2010. But until he makes a more definitive statement, he's buying himself time and preserving the option of running again.

Bobby Jindal has been selected to deliver the televised Republican response to Barack Obama's Feb. 24 address to Congress, which means Jindal will now be the subject of a wave of news stories hyping him as a rising national star.

Take it away, New York Times: "The Louisiana governor has become one to watch among those in the next generation of leaders."

For Jindal, this will probably be the main benefit of his moment in the spotlight. The content of opposition party responses tends to be forgotten by voters almost instantly (assuming it even registers with them in the first place), along with the identity of the speaker. It's not quite the same type of exposure as a convention keynote address. But reporters will remember, which will ensure Jindal an even more prominent place in media discussion about the 2012 presidential race—a discussion he very much wants to be a part of.

What's more interesting, though, is the evolution of the opposition party response into a one- (or, more rarely, two-) person showcase. It wasn't too long ago that the out-of-power party had no idea what to do with the invaluable chunk of prime time that the television networks handed them every year. Interestingly, it was Bill Clinton who helped make this clear.

Twenty-four years ago, Democrats were reeling, victims just a few months earlier of a 49-state massacre at the hands of Ronald Reagan. If nothing else, the old actor was a brilliant showman, the first president to understand and master the medium of television, a skill he put to use annually in his State of the Union addresses. It was Reagan, for instance, who inaugurated the now-clichéd practice of recognizing "everyday" American heroes in the balcony.

From a technical standpoint, Reagan's performance in 1985 was one his finest—a speech full of optimism, humor and devoutly patriotic themes delivered at the height of his popularity. There was little competition from cable television back then, so the audience was massive. Democrats, as was the custom, were given the chance to prepare a response. The current practice of anointing one spokesman to speak directly into the camera was not yet in vogue; instead, opposition parties would produce elaborate 20- or 30-minute video presentations shot in multiple locations. The Democrats' '85 version marked the beginning of the end of this custom.

Clinton, then the 38-year-old governor of Arkansas, was tapped to narrate the video, and he set a curious tone early on when he stopped in mid-sentence to say, "By the way, Mr. President, happy birthday tonight." Then, a parade of rank-and-file Democrats were shown trashing Walter Mondale, the party's '84 nominee, for having advocated tax increases while offering praise of Reagan. The video amounted to an extended apology to the American public. Reagan aides giddily suggested that they would have paid for the telecast themselves had they known its content beforehand.

Tip O'Neill, the House speaker, was furious, charging the next day that producers had gone easy on Reagan because "we did not want to hurt this kindly old man that America loves on his 74th birthday."

John White, a former Democratic national chairman, spoke for many in the party when he said: "We may not have run the best campaign in '84, and we made a lot of mistakes. But as a party, I think we stood for the right principles. I was outraged by the film's overall groveling and by the way it treated Mondale."

Even Tony Coehlo, who as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee helped oversee the video's production, later admitted that it was something he "really hated doing, because it's not my cup of tea. But the political professionals told us it's important to say you made a mistake, be humble."

For Democrats, the only silver lining was that many people never saw their apologia. While CBS and NBC carried it live, ABC decided to broadcast Dynasty instead—which ended up drawing a far better Nielsen rating than the NBC and CBS coverage combined. (ABC aired the Democratic response the next night—a Friday.)

This seemed to trigger an evolution. The following year, the party prepared a far more aggressive program. In 1987, for the first time, Democrats junked the pre-taped concept and deputized two Congressional leaders, House Speaker Jim Wright and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, to speak to the nation live. That model, one or two leaders from Capitol Hill speaking directly to the camera, prevailed for both Democrats and Republicans for the next seven years.

(One blip came in 1993, when Bob Michel, the House Republican leader, pre-taped his response to Bill Clinton's first address to Congress; he later said that the assignment was "shoved on me" and wondered "if, in retrospect, there isn't a better way of doing what I did.")

Generally, these responses were competent, if not dazzling. In February 1989, Democrats sought to capitalize on Lloyd Bentsen's sudden popularity (his "you're no Jack Kennedy" put-down of Dan Quayle was just a few months old) and asked him to take Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell's place alongside Wright in their response to George H. W. Bush's first Congressional speech. This time, not surprisingly, Bentsen's performance wasn't quite so memorable.

But in this era, from the end of Reagan's presidency into Clinton's first term, the opposition party's response essentially morphed into a mini-State of the Union, without the applause and standing ovations. No one sought to revive the elaborate productions of the '80s.

Nineteen ninety-five marked another turning point, with Republicans, suddenly the majority party in Congress, opting to use their response to showcase a single non-Washington party leader: New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, who delivered her remarks from the state capitol in Trenton.

In theory, Whitman's selection was designed to send a message of inclusion to women and moderates. "They are not dumb people," the pro-choice governor said of the G.O.P. leaders who had picked her. "The message is that the party is big and there is room for someone who is pro-choice." Whitman, like Jindal now, was treated to a flurry of reports connecting her to the next presidential race—as a prospective VP candidate, in her case. (Of course, she was never seriously considered for that spot largely because of her pro-choice views, and Clinton's eventual rout of Bob Dole in 1996 was in part the result of a wide "gender gap.")

Other than exceptions like then-presidential candidate Bob Dole's disastrous response in 1996—"I gave a fireside chat the other night," he quipped as the ghastly reviews rolled in, "and the fire went out"—this became the new response model.

Republicans chose to showcase J. C. Watts, the lone black Republican in the House, after Clinton's 1997 address to Congress; Steve Largent, a former NFL receiver and then an Oklahoma congressman, and Washington Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn in 1998; and Senators Susan Collins and Bill Frist in 2000.

Whether the exposure did much for their careers can be argued. Largent and Dunn both failed in bids to move into the House G.O.P. leadership, and Largent also suffered an upset loss in a 2002 race for governor of Oklahoma. Watts eventually became the fourth highest-ranking House Republican and was a constant presence on television in the late '90s, but Republicans would have pushed him into that role even if he hadn't delivered their response.

In this decade, Democrats did fall back several times on the old practice of using Congressional leaders, and the results were never good. In 2001, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt delivered a joint response, while Gephardt went solo in 2002; both were interested in running for president in 2004, which presumably played a role in their eagerness for the spotlight. By far, the worst experience came in 2004, when Daschle and Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, stiffly and awkwardly shared the stage, referring to each other as "Leader Pelosi" and "Leader Daschle." One television critic likened it to a Saturday Night Live sketch.

But they mostly looked outside of Washington, too. On the eve of the invasion of Baghdad in 2003, Gary Locke, the governor of Washington, delivered the Democratic response. In 2006, the honors went to Tim Kaine, then the newly elected governor Virginia; Jim Webb, who unseated Senator George Allen in November 2006, was the party's choice the next year. Last year, for George W. Bush's final address, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius got the call.

While the exposure certainly didn't hurt Kaine, Webb and Sebelius—all of whom were prominently mentioned as potential running mates for Obama last summer—it apparently had the opposite effect on Locke, who became the nation's first Asian-American governor when he was elected in 1996.

Popular at home (although viewed with some irritation by the left for his conservative economic policies), Locke was seen as a safe bet for reelection in 2004, and even a prospect for his party's national ticket in 2004. But not long after his nationally televised response, he announced that he wouldn't run again.

Ken Jacobsen, a state senator allied with Locke, told a Seattle newspaper that the reaction to the speech had unnerved Locke, with hundreds of threatening and hateful emails flooding his inbox.

"Some were really racist," Jacobsen said, "saying things like, ‘Why don't you and your family get on a boat and go back to China?' I think Gary, having had his kids later in life and maybe feeling them to be especially precious, made him worry about what they might face." Since leaving office four years ago, Locke has kept away from politics.

The nation is facing a deep and deepening economic crisis. Unemployment is rising, foreclosures are up, retail sales are down and people are worried about their future. The federal government must intervene in the economy and do whatever it takes to stimulate economic activity.

And so we are shocked—although perhaps not surprised—that Republicans have decided to come out swinging against Barack Obama’s stimulus package, thereby ignoring the nation’s problems, with the hope of winning political points at a future time. This is precisely the time when both parties should put aside ideology, and no one more so than Republicans from New York State, which is suffering from a declining economy and needs every possible dime of federal aid to sustain our state’s economy. All of New York’s House Republicans voted against the plan, including Long Island’s “maverick” Republican Peter King. Rep. King has aspirations to run for statewide office, so it was curious to see him voting against the interests of his state and putting the party line ahead of his constituents. And is it any wonder that upstate Repubilcans are  a dying breed, given that they, too, voted against the stimulus plan? 

   President Obama’s stimulus package will provide direct help to all New Yorkers. Extending unemployment assistance and providing Medicaid to the unemployed will directly help our health care sector, and relieve the state government of the burden of growing health care expenses. Moreover, the federal stimulus package will provide funds for the road and bridge repairs, and mass transit improvements, that the state direly needs. 

   New York Republicans are pursuing a self-sabotaging course if they truly believe their failure to vigorously support the stimulus package will reflect well on them. Americans don’t take kindly to being held hostage by ideologues bent on making a point at the expense of smart policy. The G.O.P.’s ongoing disdain for the election results of last November is really juvenile.

As Barack Obama said this week at a town meeting in Florida, “Doing nothing is not an option. You didn’t send me to Washington to do nothing.” We trust New York voters will take note of which of our representatives in Washington fought for our best interests, and which used this national crisis as an opportunity to perfect the art of doing nothing.

By now, Condé Nast's belt-tightening is well known, but with the recent shuttering of Domino and widespread concern of a so-called "Domino effect" at the magazine company, just how bad are things over at 4 Times Square?

Pretty bad, apparently. According to a shocking report on Vanity Fair's Web site by Jessica Flint and Elizabeth Hurlbut, Vanity Fair employees are being forced to brown bag it.

Coming only a week after it was revealed that the magazine reused its July 2007 cover of Barack Obama, it seems like life at the magazine is growing bleaker by the week. Take a moment the think about this fact: The staff of the world's glossiest magazine is bringing lunch to work.

Then again, it might not be so bad over there: The bags used to transport the lunches—everything from "Last night's home-cooked meal" to (gasp!) "Bread and a can of tuna"—are from Louis Vuitton, Missoni, and Prada. One staffer is even wiping crumbs away from his or her face with a napkin from the St. Regis.

But the real question is: Did they have to lug these bags themselves (tuna cans are heavy!) or could they have them Fed-Exed to their desks?

Jenna Lyons, the creative director of J. Crew, was on the phone, discussing her Fashion Week plans. “I would love to go,” she said, her voice streaming buoyantly through the receiver. “Omigod, it would be so much fun.” She was hoping to squeeze the shows of Derek Lam (a friend from Parsons) and Chris Benz (a former J. Crew dress designer) into her schedule. But she had pressing matters to focus on: sketches for the 2009 holiday season, due that day; a Malibu store opening in March; and the company’s sudden heightened visibility after the Obama family J. Crewed their inaugural wardrobe, from the first lady’s green gloves to the president’s white tie to their daughters’ entire outfits.

“I would love to be Alber Elbaz,” Ms. Lyons said, invoking the designer of the high-end French label Lanvin, “but it’s not in the cards!”

At J. Crew these days, thanks in large measure to her influence, chalky pink T-shirts are festooned with girlish chiffon rosettes, and Loro Piano cashmere from Italy (on sale for $125) abuts friendly customer-service counters where brides-to-be pore over their attendants dresses in colors like spiced wine, espresso and tea rose. After a disappointing last quarter of 2008—partly because of the economy; partly because of a botched Web site upgrade that disrupted online orders and left the company with excess inventory—Ms. Lyons is greeting the coming year with optimism, rolling out a frilly spring collection in pale, makeup hues.

“I think happy is important,” she said. “I think, you know, smiles and warmth and all of those things are going to mean a lot right now. As much as black is important, it can be somber, and there’s no question that color affects people’s moods. So we’re going to try and keep it really upbeat.”

Ms. Lyons, 40, has assumed increasing creative control in the six years since former Gap CEO Millard “Mickey” Drexler began a much admired resuscitation of this all-American brand. She has worked at the company almost half her life, rising up through the ranks of women’s design and now overseeing all the clothes, the Web site, the store design and the catalog. Six feet tall, she has been photographed at fashion parties around the city in black-rimmed glasses and lots of jewelry; she lives in a crisp, moody-hued Park Slope brownstone with her artist husband, Vincent Mazeau, and quirkily named son (the house was featured in Domino in flusher times). And she is the reason people no longer think of J. Crew as a place to get a barn jacket. 

“I meet people sometimes and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know J. Crew, I have a roll-neck sweater,’” Ms. Lyons said, groaning. “And I’m like ‘Oh, no, no, that’s not the J. Crew I’m talking about!’”

THE ‘UNDULATING’ WARDROBE

In the years since Mr. Drexler took over, the brand has wedged itself into what is arguably a new retail sweet spot: Call it the Middle.

Ignored for years as shoppers heaped love on the idea of high-low, the Middle is having a moment. Perhaps it began when Isaac Mizrahi, who basically invented masstige at Target, jumped ship last year to Liz Claiborne, a classic (if ailing) American brand in its own right. Mr. Mizrahi’s first prim, colorfully upscale collection for the brand hits stores this month. It is also embodied by Tory Burch, a breakout success story of the past few years who built her business on Oprah, colorful tunics, ballet flats and accessible $200 and $300 price points.

It’s not that shoppers are eschewing H&M. But throwaway fashion can seem wasteful nowadays.

Having allowed his Republican opponents to dominate the economic debate for two weeks as his stimulus proposal languished, President Obama used his first news conference to rebut them—coolly and civilly, yet without leaving any doubt that he can strike back harder if necessary. He drew the lines that had to be drawn, calling out the opposition’s hypocrisy on spending and identifying conservatives whose answer is to do nothing (except cut taxes for the rich, as always).

For the White House, the strategic issue is whether he waited too long to confront the stimulus critics—and how he will balance bipartisanship with toughness in dealing with the recalcitrant Republicans from now on.

As the debate over the stimulus unfolded, the still mighty conservative propaganda machine incessantly churned out three talking points, encountering very little effective response from the newly empowered progressives:

We should reject the president’s plan because we need tax cuts, they said, not spending. We should reject the president’s plan because the plan is spending, not stimulus. We should reject the president’s plan because the spending will increase the deficit.

And though this was rarely articulated with any candor, we should reject his plan because government always makes matters worse—and the market will eventually solve the problem of falling demand without intervention.

Replying to questions from reporters, Mr. Obama seized the chance to gut each of these arguments in straightforward language. Tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest citizens won’t solve our economic problems, he said, because “time and time again” the Bush administration followed that course, “and it has only helped lead us to the crisis that we face right now.”

Spending is the main purpose of the stimulus package—indeed, there is no stimulus without spending, as economists of almost every school agree—so the stimulus bill involves spending because “that’s the point.” And as for the politicians now whining about the deficit, their irresponsible stewardship when they controlled Congress left the federal fisc drowned in red.

Making that last thrust on the deficit, Mr. Obama sharply mocked the sudden rediscovery of fiscal rectitude on the other side. “What I’ve been concerned about is some of the language that’s been used suggesting that this [bill] is full of pork and this is wasteful government spending. First of all, when I hear that from folks who presided over a doubling of the national debt, then I just want them not to engage in some revisionist history. I inherited the deficit that we have right now and the economic crisis that we have right now.” Regarding those duplicitous politicians, he added later, “I’m not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.”

Wisely, he also drew an important distinction between Republicans who actually want to engage in constructive dialogue and Republicans who merely want to emit obstructive noise. “I’m happy to get good ideas from across the political spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans. What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. And that’s part of what the election in November was all about. O.K.?”

For most Americans, as the overwhelming poll numbers supporting the president indicate, the answer is yes, O.K. Most Americans want the four million jobs that the president’s proposal is designed to create or preserve. Most Americans agree that government must act.

But the president’s hesitancy in rising to the attack since Inauguration Day did not serve him well. The same polls that bolster him show that the Republican talking points about spending and taxes—no matter how illogical or even illiterate—have created doubts even among his supporters. 

What can he do about that? Among Mr. Obama’s favorite themes is “consistency.” From now on, he and his allies must deliver a strong, consistent message about the role of the public sector—and the bankruptcy of ideological conservatism.

jconason@observer.com

Anyone with a grasp of modern domestic political history should have seen last week's stimulus package impasse in the Senate coming.

It was not at all surprising that Republicans loudly demagogued the package as a massive dose of pork, even as their examples of "pork" accounted for a tiny fraction of the overall bill. Nor was it surprising that the G.O.P.—the same party that added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt between the Reagan-Bush years and George W. Bush's presidency—suddenly expressed horror at the idea of deficit spending.

And it certainly wasn't a shock that Republicans, even as Democrats accused them of playing Russian Roulette with the economy, maintained a united Congressional front—one that forced Democrats in the House to rely on a party-line vote to push the package through their chamber and that compelled exasperated Senate Democrats to seek a compromise that could attract just enough Republican votes to kill a G.O.P.-led filibuster in their chamber.

For Democrats, this progression of events was as maddening as it was unavoidable. This kind of unyielding opposition is what the modern Congressional Republican Party, one dominated by conservatives from ultra-red districts where Sarah Palin would easily outpoll Barack Obama, does best. This is not a crowd likely to be swayed by warnings that inaction might cause a wholesale economic catastrophe. Why, that's just fear-mongering from the liberal media!

Measured against these realities, Democrats ought to be feeling pretty good right now. Last Friday, they reached a deal with three Republicans senators—Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Arlen Specter—that will allow a stimulus package to clear that chamber. It is slightly different from the House version (mainly, to the understandable disappointment of many Democrats, because the Senate compromise eliminates tens of billions of dollars in money for education and aid to cash-strapped states), but the overlap between the two is substantial. A final version should now clear both chambers within a week.

But the mood is anything but joyful on the left, where the prevailing view of the compromise goes something like this: Instead of going to war with Republicans, Mr. Obama foolishly pursued bipartisanship, empowering a handful of self-proclaimed "centrist" Senate Republicans to gut the stimulus plan of its most valuable components, producing a bill that won't do much to help the economy but that will validate every Republican talking point about how worthless government is.

"My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on his blog.

There is obvious validity to the left's complaints about what was left out of the bill, just as the eye-rolling at the fawning media treatment that Senators Collins, Snowe and Specter have received is warranted: Besides being able to brag that they forced concessions and brokered a deal, what exactly was the point—from a policy standpoint—of the cuts that they demanded? The very purpose of a stimulus plan is to pump as much money into the economy as possible.

But the ugly truth in Congressional politics—the truth the Democrats were up against from the minute the stimulus plan was introduced—is that what is right often has to take a back seat to what is possible. The Republicans were always going to oppose the stimulus in lockstep in the House and near-lockstep in the Senate. No amount of bullying from Mr. Obama would have changed this. For Republicans, the stimulus debate—the first major legislative initiative from the president who just clobbered at the polls—was an opportunity to teach him some humility, and to prove their own relevance. They weren't going to pass that up.

This is precisely what happened to Bill Clinton in his first months as president in 1993, when he proposed an economic stimulus plan of his own. Granted, his proposal was much, much smaller and the times were different, with economists agreeing that a recovery from the early '90s recession was under way. But the '93 debate played out almost exactly like this one: Republicans hyped a bunch of outrageous-sounding examples of pork that added up to a small portion of the overall bill and, with 43 Senate votes, held rank through multiple Democratic efforts to break their filibuster.

Eventually, Mr. Clinton gave up and the G.O.P. celebrated an early victory, while Democrats—just like now—lamented the human toll: "While the Champagne corks are popping, millions of Americans will open a can of beans and wonder whether they are going to find a job," Democratic Senator Robert Byrd gravely declared.

This time, though, the filibuster threat didn't work as well, and there were just enough Republicans willing to make a deal. Their terms may have been absurd, but that's the reality of Congressional politics. In the end, Mr. Obama will get about 90 percent of what he originally wanted and will still have several opportunities—in his upcoming budget, in another financial rescue package, and possibly in a follow-up stimulus plan—to go back and get the rest.

It's hardly perfect. But that's how it goes.