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.

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.

DAVOS - Within days of Hillary Clinton's confirmation as secretary of state, her husband already appears to be applying his skills and connections in the service of the new administration's diplomacy.

Upon arriving here on Wednesday afternoon, he conducted a series of quiet meetings with foreign leaders that culminated in an intense late-night discussion with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The two former presidents met at a Sheraton hotel where Putin held a private party, following an early evening reception at a local museum hosted by Clinton.

Putin greeted Clinton cordially as "our good friend" as they raised glasses of vodka and then listened to a pianist pound out "In the Hall of the Mountain King." When the musical entertainment concluded, they moved to a table in a separate room with access strictly controlled by Secret Service and Russian security agents. Flanked by aides and an interpreter, the two men talked for nearly 90 minutes before they rose and walked out together for a few pictures with partygoers and members of Clinton's entourage.

Neither man commented on the substance of their discussions, and there was no indication that Clinton was carrying a particular message to the Russian leader. But the Obama administration has signaled its intention to seek greater Russian cooperation on issues such as the Iranian nuclear program. And Putin's public remarks at the World Economic Forum yesterday were encouraging if vague as he called for more constructive relations between Moscow and the West.

As for Clinton, it is clear that he can pursue significant tasks for U.S. diplomacy -- and his reception by world leaders in Davos shows that he will continue to be an active figure on the international stage.

Kirsten Gillibrand kind of knows everyone in politics. Just ask her.
“What makes me so successful is that I’ve developed so many relationships,” she said in a phone interview on Jan. 27, hours after being sworn in as a U.S. senator, as she walked to the Senate floor to cast her first vote. “Because I did fund-raising and organizing in New York for 10 years before I ever ran for office, I developed so many great relationships with all the people that care about elective politics. From the public servants to the donors to the community organizers.
“These were all the relationships I called upon when I decided to run,” she continued. “When I did my first poll I asked Hillary Clinton to review it. I asked Andrew Cuomo to review it. I asked Eliot Spitzer to review it. These are all people that I had worked with helping them to get elected, working on their causes, so they all had become friends through my 10 years of organizing in New York.”  
Ms. Gillibrand, who replaces Hillary Clinton as New York’s junior senator, has been portrayed, alternately, as an apple-fed upstate yokel and a grasping Tracy Flick.
Both ideas underestimate her.
She is a leviathan—a Schumer-esque fund-raising monster with a political pedigree; a careerist overachiever who has studiously cultivated ties to a surprising number of the most powerful Democrats in the state and the country; a fearsome campaigner who, despite her wholesome appearance, is comfortable in the mud.
Ms. Gillibrand is the pure, unadulterated political creature that a state like New York demands. And now that she is a senator, it seems impossible—naïve, even—to picture her as anything else.
“Like Schumer, her eye has been on that prize for a long, long time,” said Jonathan Schiller, a founding partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where Ms. Gillibrand worked as a partner early in the decade. “She is no hayseed, she is no newcomer, she’s no shy, reclusive country girl. She is someone who grew up in a political family.”
Her wont to travel in elite circles isn’t news to the political cognoscenti.
Last year, Anthony Weiner thought he had scored as the only member of Congress to make it into an exclusive Hillary Clinton event with New York’s top fund-raisers and power brokers at the Museum of Modern Art.
That is, until he looked around the room and noticed that a junior colleague, Representative Kirsten Gillibrand from the yonder Hudson Valley, was already there, going from one bigwig to the next collecting business cards, shaking hands and extracting campaign contributions.
“She’s working the tables,” he recalled. “She’s shmoozing. It was chutzpah, but you’ve got to admire it. She represents Hudson. It’s not like she happened to be at the bar at the Modern. And even more interesting, from my perspective, is that she seemed to know a lot of those people already.”
Ms. Gillibrand is clearly resented by some of her former House colleagues (though not, Mr. Weiner made clear, by Mr. Weiner). She probably doesn’t much care.
Born into an elite Albany political clan—she is the daughter of an influential lobbyist with Republican ties and the granddaughter of a close aide to Erastus Corning, the longtime mayor of Albany—the 42-year-old has nurtured deep Clinton ties and Cuomo connections. She is the pick of the Patersons and a favorite of Rahm Emanuel.
Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director and now a key aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, acted as media guru for her 2006 campaign. Her longtime pollster is Jefrey Pollock, of Global Strategy Group, which represents the governor and Mr. Cuomo. She counts as friends the city’s top lawyers and fund-raisers.
“From very early on, she would say that the family was from upstate and that she would one day go home and run for Congress,” said Ann Lewis, a close aide to Mrs. Clinton who first met Mrs. Gillibrand in 1999. “I think her family was better connected than I knew.”
She went to college at Dartmouth, studied in China, interned in Austria and then came home and worked at a prestigious law firm. Later, she worked as a special counsel to Andrew Cuomo when he served in the Clinton administration as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  
Even after she went back into the private sector to work as a lawyer at a white-shoe firm, the public sector was never far from her mind.
Mr. Schiller said that “throughout the time she worked here, and closely with me on complex federal litigation, she was in touch with Hillary Clinton, she was in touch with the Democratic Party. She never stopped thinking about and planning her career.”
“This was when email was emerging as a political tool, and she was very organized, always hosting meetings, and storing information about events that were going on around the country,” said Ryan Karben, a former assemblyman who worked across Lexington Avenue at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett when Ms. Gillibrand worked at Davis Polk Wardwell in 2001 and 2002. “She clearly had great political organizational skills.”
“She was one of the early volunteers for Hillary and was one of the original volunteers of women for Hillary,” Ms. Lewis said.  (Karen Persichilli Keogh, Clinton’s former state director, is already advising the new senator, and Ms. Lewis said she would gladly help, too, if asked.)
And Ms. Gillibrand, running in a race in 2006 that nearly no one expected her to win, was a much more vicious campaigner than anyone knew. She savaged Republican incumbent John Sweeney--once again, in a style eerily reminiscent of Chuck Schumer, who dismantled incumbent (and onetime Gillibrand mentor) Al D’Amato in 1998.

“Early on you could see that she was a tough cookie,” said Jen Psaki, who worked on the Gillibrand race in 2006 for the DCCC.  
Ms. Psaki, now a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, recalled that Ms. Gillibrand essentially forced the race onto the DCCC’s radar, and that she became a favorite of the psychotically aggressive DCCC chair Mr. Emanuel, who is now Barack Obama’s chief of staff.
According to another Democratic aide who worked on the campaign, when Mr. Sweeney demanded that Ms. Gillibrand release her tax returns to demonstrate whether she paid New York City residency fees—a tactic intended to frame her as a rich, Brit-marrying cosmopolitan elitist—she demanded that Mr. Sweeney release his police records. According to the aide, the campaign knew Mr. Sweeney had several arrests to his name dating back to the ’70s, including an episode in which wine, Mr. Sweeney’s car and an electric pole combined to leave several people stranded on a ski lift. She never released her tax returns, and with the help of Mr. Sweeney’s subsequent run-ins with the law, won the race by a healthy margin.
Once in the House, her votes on gun, immigration and gay issues frustrated many of her Democratic colleagues. But even more infuriating to some members, including Nancy Pelosi, was her attempt to jump ahead of more senior members to fill a vacant seat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
But even colleagues who disagree with her policies can’t help but marvel at her political acumen.
“As a freshman, to come in and be put on the Steering and Policy Committee, that’s huge,” said Yvette Clarke, who came into the House with Ms. Gillibrand in the 110th Congress.
When asked how that happened, Ms. Clarke said, “If I had the answer to that, I’d be on Steering and Policy.”
There is every reason to expect that Ms. Gillibrand will be equally hard to ignore in the Senate. Asked how she expected the dynamic to work between her and Mr. Unignorable himself, Chuck Schumer, she said, “I really feel like our areas of expertise are complementary. Yes, he will always be senior and I will be junior, but I don’t see that as a relationship of one lesser than the other. I just think he has much more experience, which obviously is going to make him very effective and powerful.”
(Her initial Senate committee assignments, for the record, are Public Works and Environment, Foreign Affairs and Agriculture.)

If she remains a work-in-progress on the issues, Ms. Gillibrand has the routine of actually being a winning politician down.
“She was an accomplished attorney, so there’s that whole world she could tap into in,” said Ms. Clarke. “Bill and Hillary both went to support her in her run; that in itself opens the door to a whole other cadre of donors. She knows how to establish those relationships and cultivate them. And from those relationships you get to move on to other relationships.”
She added, “She just parlayed whoever she knew into influence.” To be sure, the Park Avenue penthouses and townhouses of New York’s rarified fund-raising community is familiar terrain to Ms. Gillibrand.
Hassan Nemazee, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser who served as a co-finance chair on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said he had first met Ms. Gillibrand before her 2006 race and was impressed by the case she made as to why she could win in a reliably Republican district. The down-home upstate routine, he suggested, was only part of the picture.
“Look how successful she has been at raising money in Manhattan,” Mr. Nemazee said. “If you are just a parochial candidate you are not as successful as she has been.”
“She’s fabulous,” said Ellen Chesler, a prominent donor and early fund-raiser for Ms. Gillibrand, who was introduced to her by mutual friends in the Clinton universe. “She raised close to five million dollars for a seat where nobody who gave her money lives.”
Sometimes, the admiration is grudging. But, at least in process terms, it’s always there.
Teachers union head Randi Weingarten, the apparent runner-up to Ms. Gillibrand in Mr. Paterson’s post-Kennedy senate search (she was the last candidate to receive word that she would not be a senator), said Ms. Gillibrand was something of a “star” among female Democrats.
Asked about the various complaints having to do with Ms. Gillibrand’s win-at-all-costs reputation in the House, Ms. Weingarten did say, “One of the things that Hillary taught everyone was how much she was a team player. Ultimately collaboration becomes very important for getting things done.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 23, Ms. Gillibrand put on her team-player hat as she stood in Meeting Room 6 in the Capitol building. That didn’t stop all the state’s power brokers from jostling for a coveted place in the camera shot at her side.
Onstage, Mr. D’Amato alighted over his old intern’s right shoulder. Mr. Schumer signaled for her to shuffle closer to him. The Albany legislative triumvirate of State Senator Neil Breslin, Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari, and Assemblyman Jack McEneny entered the room just before Ms. Gillibrand’s family.
When Ms. Gillibrand spoke, she turned on the folksy charm. Wearing a black pantsuit and pearls, she expressed bewilderment at the mass of reporters assembled before her and deferred to Mr. Paterson in the running of the question-and-answer session. When her young son hopped onto the stage, she put her hand on his head. She affected an oh-my-gosh air and talked about licking envelopes in her grandmother’s office. The audience, aware that her grandmother was a power player in the capital’s Democratic machine, nodded knowingly.
“She comes from a very important political family in Albany,” said State Senator Neil Breslin after the event.
On Jan 26, Ms. Gillibrand kept doing the modest thing. Without any apparent security detail, she walked into the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. Two reporters behind her didn’t immediately realize who she was. She again deferred to Mr. Paterson during the press conference, but in her answers, she made it clear she was a player to be reckoned with. She talked about dining with Harry Reid and said she’d sit on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee. When asked about her stance on immigration, which has been criticized by Latino and other immigrant groups as cynically nativist, Ms. Gillibrand indicated that she’d maintain a less-than-lenient line.
“My view has always been that we need to right-size immigration,” she said, adding that she believed in a need to “have a database in the Department of Labor of immigrants who have been cleared, who are legal, that are part of our system, and the number has to be the right number.”
“I’m going to be a voice to solve this problem,” she said.
Ms. Gillibrand knows the cold realities of politics. But she also knows there is time for softballs and smiles.
At the end of the Hyde Park event, as reporters swarmed Ms. Gillibrand with questions, she thanked them for the work they did and promised to speak with them in the near future. As she left the room, a diminutive elderly woman came up to greet her.
“I’ve met you once before,” said the woman. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, it’s good to see you. Thanks for your support,” Ms. Gillibrand said. “God bless you!”
“She’s being portrayed as a lightweight,” Tom Poelker, a party chairman in a neighboring county, who has watched Ms. Gillibrand closely, said after attending the event in Hyde Park. “My opinion is that there’s not much that gets by Senator-designee Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s very sharp—very perceptive. Extremely perceptive. Very perceptive politically.”
And how does Ms. Gillibrand herself respond to those people who say that she is, in fact, an overblown lightweight? Or an overambitious climber?
“It doesn’t bother me at all, because at the end of the day, this is just the short term,” she said in the phone interview. “I think all of this will smooth out as I demonstrate my effectiveness and my work ethic and as I partner with all the constituency groups in our state and make a difference for them.”

With apologies to all of the important and influential news outlets that are playing it up, there is absolutely nothing newsworthy about John Boehner's apparent declaration of war on Barack Obama's $825 billion economic stimulus package.

You didn't actually think the top Republican in the U.S. House was going to support the new Democratic president's first major legislative initiative, did you? This is what opposition leaders in Congress do. When Ronald Reagan took office, Tip O'Neill fought his tax cuts. When Bill Clinton was elected, Bob Dole, then the Senate G.O.P. leader, declared himself the "chaperone" of the new president's honeymoon.

Now it's Mr. Boehner's turn. Mr. Obama is calling for $550 billion in new spending and $275 billion in tax relief. Mr. Boehner's response is as formulaic as his posture: not enough tax cuts and too much spending! He's even equipped himself with the obligatory Outrageous Examples of (supposedly) wasteful spending.

"$200 million to fix up the National Mall, $21 million for sod, over $200 million for contraceptives - how is any of this going to fix an ailing economy?" Mr. Boehner said over the weekend. This what Republican opposition leaders do - even if their party just spent the last eight years pushing the national debt to nearly $10 trillion.

The usual pledges of bipartisanship aside, there was never any chance that Mr. Boehner was going to be anything but critical of Mr. Obama's stimulus plan. Any other posture would invite a mutiny from within the House G.O.P. ranks. (It's a little different in the more measured and talk-radio-resistant world of the Senate, where G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell has indicated some willingness to entertain some version of the Obama plan.)

This lack of suspense extends to Mr. Boehner's House colleagues. Since they largely hail from G.O.P.-dominated districts, there's little to be gained for most Republicans in supporting Mr. Obama, just as there's no incentive for most Democrats to stand up to a popular president from their own party. In terms of the stimulus package, this means that, despite the high-volume debate about to unfold in Congress, the final vote should mainly be along party lines.

The representatives, in other words, will vote their own political interests.

History backs this up. Consider the last two newly elected presidents who came to power during economic turmoil and who quickly proposed sweeping economic programs. Both presidents, Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Bill Clinton in 1993, ultimately got their way, although with drastically different political repercussions (Reagan emerged from his budget victory triumphant, while Mr. Clinton was almost apologetic.)

Start with Reagan's 1981 budget, which passed the House on a 253-176 vote. It was regarded as a stunning feat, given that Democrats owned a 244-191 majority in the chamber. Sixty-five Democrats ended up crossing over to support the Reagan budget, with no Republican defections the other way.

This is regarded as perhaps the most vivid display of a presidential mandate at work in the modern era. There's something to this claim. As the vote neared and O'Neill frantically tried to keep his caucus united, Reagan, elected in a 44-state landslide and only a few weeks removed from an assassination attempt that only bolstered his popularity, appealed to the public in a national television address. O'Neill didn't stand a chance.

"They say they're voting for it because they're afraid," was how Connecticut Representative Toby Moffett explained the defections.

But look closer. Forty-four of those 65 Democrats were conservatives, generally from the South, who today would simply be Republicans (just as the liberal Yankee Republicans of that era are now Democrats). Today's clear and sharp ideological divide between the parties was still taking shape. By current standards, Reagan's popularity was only good enough for about 20 true crossover votes, if that. Otherwise, everyone stuck to the script.

Now consider 1993. As in '80, the flagging economy had been the chief issue in the 1992 campaign, with Bill Clinton promising to focus on it "like a laser beam." But Mr. Clinton didn't enjoy a Reagan mandate. He stumbled badly in his early months as president, and as his economic plan - which included a tax hike for upper-income Americans and not the middle-class cut he had promised during the campaign - came up for a final vote, his popularity was below 50 percent.

Because of his poor standing, Mr. Clinton and his budget were vulnerable to the opposition party's attacks in a way that Reagan's never was. Public opinion moved squarely against the plan, derided by the G.O.P. as "the biggest tax increase in American history." Just as they'd been afraid to buck Reagan in '81, Democrats now feared standing with their own president.

Nonetheless, most members of Congress stuck to the script. Every Republican in both houses voted against the budget, while 38 Democrats in the House - again many moderate-to-conservative Southerners - and six from the Senate joined them. It was just enough for Mr. Clinton to prevail, to the (initial) irritation of most voters.

The takeaway lesson seems to be this: a popular first-year president can attract a handful of opposition party votes for his signature initiative, while an unpopular one stands to suffer a handful of defections from his own party. That's about all that's up for grabs in Congress.

Mr. Obama currently enjoys an approval rating of 69 percent and is reaching out to House Republicans, hoping to make deep inroads on the stimulus vote. No doubt, his program will end up passing - Democrats have the numbers and will be unified. But it will be a shock if more than a scattering of Republicans don't follow their leader, Mr. Boehner, and use the vote to cater to their base. 

Nothing to see here.

Terry McAuliffe has attended many fund-raisers at the Park Avenue apartment of influential Democratic bundler Hassan Nemazee.

But last week he was there for the first time as a candidate. On the night of Jan. 22, McAuliffe, the former chairman of the DNC, voluble longtime Clinton fund-raiser and now candidate for governor of Virginia, was introduced by former President Bill Clinton before appealing to his former cohorts for contributions last night at an event that raised approximately $350,000 for his campaign.

As bundlers including Alan Patricof, Marc Lasry, Stanley Shuman and John Catsimatidis bit into spring rolls and dumplings, Clinton said it was an "honor and a privilege to be a supporter of Terry McAuliffe and to be in a position to return the favor that he has done for me and Hillary for so many years," according to Nemazee. McAuliffe then stated his case – business savvy to turnaround Virginia's economic woes – to a crowd with a zero percentage of Virginia residents. Still, the cream of New York's bundler society present at the dinner could be said to account for McAuliffe's financial base.

According to campaign finance reports released this month, McAuliffe raised $950,000 in the last six months in his home state. He did about a third of that in a couple of hours last night.

Still, he's working his home state hard.

At the Mid-Atlantic ball following the inauguration last week, McAuliffe, dressed in a tuxedo with a sequined cummerbund and bow tie, posed for pictures with Virginians in front of flags and roamed the carpeted convention hall looking for hands to shake. At the ball, one political operative from Virginia said, "He has no chance."

But McAuliffe's ability to raise money from out of state, and especially from New York's wealthy Clinton country, makes him a serious contender. And the lack of a limit in Virginia's campaign finance law on personal and corporate donations means that he can raise a lot of money quickly. (One attendee at the dinner called the lack of a limit, "painful.")

Nemazee said the largest donation at the event at his home was around $10,000, and that the support for McAuliffe was strong. "It was a tremendous turnout," Nemazee said. "People are fatigued by the amount of effort and time and expense that has gone into the political season that ended in November, so to be able to ask people in January, and in this economic climate for donations, is a testament to support for Terry as a friend and a candidate."

UPDATE: And right on cue, he's up with his first TV ad. It doesn't mention the word "Clinton."

WASHINGTON--Bill Clinton paused from the ceaseless hand-shaking and picture-posing in his wife’s K Street political headquarters to make a prediction about how the interests of New York city and state would fare under the new administration.

“You know, they have such smart people and a lot of them are New Yorkers,” he told the Observer in a corner of the 10th floor office of Friends of Hillary. “You’ve got Geithner. You’ve got Donovan. Hillary.” Here, a squinting smile.

“So I’m upbeat, he said. “I expect New York to do quite well.”

It was the day before the inauguration, and the former president (and New York resident) echoed the outwardly optimistic view of many New York officials who descended on the nation’s capital for the days of exclusive cocktail parties, political dinners, sacred services and boozy media functions surrounding the historic swearing-in.

But along with the optimism about the country’s new leadership was some nervous uncertainty about New York’s own. With Hillary Clinton still waiting to be confirmed as secretary of state, David Paterson was still doing his best not to give any indication of who he intended to pick to fill her Senate seat.

 “I think there have been a half a dozen candidates mentioned, maybe more, who I think would do an excellent job,” said Mr. Clinton, who, unlike most of the lower-profile Democrats around him, might plausibly not have a horse in that particular race. “That’s the governor’s choice and he has enough pressure on him from other people. I’m not going to add to it. I used to be a governor. I’m not going to do that.

For their part, the actual candidates for the job did their best to appear deferential to the governor, and spent what was essentially crunch time for their stealth campaigns granting Mr. Paterson a conspicuously wide berth.

Caroline Kennedy, who arrived in Washington on Jan. 19, scheduled no public events other than visiting with her family and attending the inauguration. (Though Maria Shriver, told the Observer as she left an opening ceremony concert at the Lincoln Memorial that she thought her cousins chances were “good.”) Andrew Cuomo also kept his distance. (Though Lanny Davis, a close Clinton ally, called him “the best qualified.”)  The less-discussed candidates engaged in some delicate profile-raising while simultaneously trying not to seem overly eager.

Representative Steve Israel threw a party on the day before the inauguration at the Monocle, a restaurant a few blocks away from the Senate building. Surrounded by New York county chairs sipping on free beer and feasting on free salmon, Mr. Israel offered hugs and kisses and hearty pounds to everyone who came over to say hello.

 “This process has been wonderful,” said Mr. Israel, watched by his press secretary as he spoke slowly. “No matter what happens. I’ve loved traveling through the state and I will keep traveling no matter what happens.”

His press secretary nodded with approval.    

Mr. Israel and his entourage then headed over to the Smithsonian for Mr. Paterson’s party in honor of the New York Democratic Party. Some members of the delegation, like Representative Jerry Nadler, took the metro, where some straphangers also had animated conversations about Ms. Kennedy’s effort to fill the Senate vacancy.

“There’s not a caste system in our society,” a man in a down jacket said to Barbara Hetzel, a Democratic chair from Allegany County.

“I agree with you,” said Ms. Hetzel, who supports either Kirsten Gillibrand or Mr. Cuomo for the job. “You’re not born into it, you have to earn it. New York is not Massachusetts and we have problems in New York.” 

 Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Cuomo skipped the event at the Smithsonian, but several of the other candidates made sure to show their faces.

On the surface, the parallels are haunting between the mess Tim Geithner has found himself in and the one that sank Zoe Baird’s nomination for attorney general 16 years ago. But his chances of avoiding her fate aren’t that bad.

Baird, a 40-year-old corporate lawyer who was incoming President Bill Clinton’s choice to become the first woman to run the Justice Department, was forced to withdraw her nomination after it was revealed that she’d knowingly hired two illegal Peruvian immigrants as household help and then failed to pay Social Security taxes for them.

Since then, two other Cabinet nominees have been felled by similar scandals: Clinton’s replacement choice for Baird, Kimba Wood; and George W. Bush’s first pick for Secretary of Labor in 2001, Linda Chavez. But Wood quickly stepped aside almost immediately after her “nanny problem” was revealed, while Chavez, since she was nominated for a lower-profile Cabinet role, didn’t cause much of a stir with her troubles.

Baird’s case was different, touching a nerve among the public, which quickly came to view her as a symbol of an aristocratic class that believed itself to be above the law. Waves of popular protest ensued, and her support in the Senate evaporated. Baird’s story stands as a case study in how a seemingly safe and innocuous Cabinet appointment can turn into a disaster almost overnight.

Which brings us to Geithner, Barack Obama’s choice to head the Treasury Department. Until about 24 hours ago, Geithner’s nomination seemed every bit the slam dunk that, in 1993, Baird’s initially seemed. Then came last night’s reports that he, too, employed an illegal immigrant in his house and also that he failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes (although not for his household help – Geithner’s tax problem stems from his work with the International Monetary Fund early this decade).

Eerily, the Baird story broke on the same date, January 13, on which the reports about Geithner emerged. Then, as now, the nominee’s supporters stood by her and forecast that the revelation would be but a small bump in an otherwise smooth confirmation process. Clinton put out word that he’d been aware of Baird’s problem before nominating her, while top Senate Democrats mostly shrugged it off.

"Based on the facts as I now know them to be, and after consultation with several of my colleagues on the committee, I do not believe this matter will prevent her confirmation," said Joe Biden, then the chairman of the committee that would oversee Baird’s confirmation hearings.

Similarly, Obama was quick to rally around Geithner on Tuesday night, with the president-elect’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, praising Geithner’s previous government service and arguing that it “should not be tarnished by honest mistakes, which, upon learning of them, he quickly addressed.”

Geithner, alerted by the IRS that he owed money during an audit, paid about $43,000 in back taxes and penalties in 2006, and then cut another check for about $5,500 last month when the Senate Judiciary Committee turned up several other issues with his tax returns.

Baird’s backers initially pointed to similar acts of contrition: She and her husband had paid $12,000 in back taxes and penalties before her nanny problem was reported, and she also paid a $2,900 fine to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for hiring undocumented workers.

Also just like now, initial news reports characterized the Baird controversy as minor and predicted that it would quickly blow over. Much was made of the fact that Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, vowed to stand by Baird, hailing her as “as straight a shooter as I've seen – very intelligent, an excellent nominee.” That would be the same Orrin Hatch who is now pledging support for Geithner and praising the nominee for addressing the controversy “forthrightly.”

But the public wasn’t about to let Baird off the hook so quickly. Her transgressions lent themselves perfectly to mass outrage: Here was a woman who was seeking to become the nation’s top law enforcement official who had knowingly and willfully broke the law. An army of conservative talk radio listeners mobilized against her, but resentment of Baird quickly bled across party lines. The story became a national sensation.

Within days, moderate Democrats in the Senate, including David Boren, James Exon, John Breaux and J. Bennett Johnston, had turned on her, and Republicans, even though they were badly outnumbered in the Senate, sensed an opportunity to score a major early victory against the new president. On the night Clinton was inaugurated, Biden phoned the president to say that Baird’s Senate prospects were hopeless. She withdrew the next day.

In theory, it should be just as easy to whip the public into a frenzy about Geithner: Here is a man who wants to be in charge of collecting taxes from every American, but who failed to pay his own. (The nanny issue may not be as severe in his case, since his employee was legal at the time of her hiring; her paperwork only expired a few months before she stopped working for the Geithner family.) Some Republicans, most notably Iowa’s Charles Grassley, are now hinting that Geithner’s nomination may be in jeopardy, and the date for his confirmation hearings has now been moved back to next week to give the committee more time to prepare.

But that’s probably as far as the Baird comparison will go. For one thing, Geithner’s tax issue, while embarrassing, can be plausibly explained as a technical and unintentional violation – one that he addressed long before he was nominated, not after (as was the case for Baird). No one wants the treasury secretary to be confused about the intricacies of the tax code, and Geithner will surely face tough questions from the committee about his tax issues; a few senators might even oppose him. But it will also count for something that he doesn’t appear to have knowingly flouted the law. What sunk Baird wasn’t incompetence; it was her image as another Leona Helmsley, sneering at all the “little people.”

Perhaps more importantly, the climate is different now. In 1993, the country was emerging from an economic slump. Now, there is widespread fear that America is speeding toward another Depression. Especially when it comes to the nomination of a treasury secretary, there just isn’t as much appetite – among voters or among Republicans in the Senate – for a confirmation fight.

Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearings are now underway. Sitting next to Chuck Schumer, who introduced her, and in front of her daughter Chelsea, Clinton nodded as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee made their opening remarks.

John Kerry, the committee's new chairman, and a onetime hopeful for the job Clinton is poised to assume, opened the meeting by admiring Clinton's "diplomatic acumen" and her "stature to project America's world leadership."

He then yielded the floor to Dick Luger, a Republican, who called Mrs. Clinton the "epitome of a big leaguer," which he said was the ultimate requirement for a secretary of state.

It fell to Luger to outline what he called the greatest concern for Clinton's appointment.

Luger questioned whether Clinton's activities as secretary of state "can be reconciled with the sweeping global activities of President Bill Clinton" and said that the former president's foundation presents "a temptation for any foreign government" to sway American foreign policy. The problem, Luger said, was the perception that a foreign donation, even a well-intentioned one aimed at the eradication of diseases like HIV-AIDS, could be perceived abroad as influencing American foreign policy. The easiest solution, Luger said, was for the foundation to simply "foreswear new foreign contributions."

He acknowledged the memorandum of understanding between the Clintons and the Obama administration to make future donations transparent, but called that a minimum requirement.

After taking back the floor, Kerry said Luger was not speaking from a partisan perspective but "is really expressing the view of the committee as a whole."

Fred Hochberg, dean of the Milano the New School for Management and Urban Policy, is reportedly getting an appointment with the Obama administration as the head of the Export-Import Bank.

Hochberg, who is openly gay, worked as a deputy in the Small Business Administration under Bill Clinton.

The possible appointment is getting praise from the LGBT community. The Human Rights Coalition sent out a statement saying Hochberg’s appointment “speaks well for the LGBT community.” Influential Democratic consultant and gay activist Ethan Geto told me, “Fred Hochberg has the credentials and is qualified for that position.”

Geto stressed that Hochberg’s business acumen more than qualified for the position, but said he also benefited by a national push by the LGBT community for more appointments for openly gay people in the administration. When Bill Richardson announced he was declining the job as Commerce Secretary, activist from across the country pushed for it to go to Hochberg.

Hochberg’s appointment also comes as the Obama administration may want to mollify anger from the LGBT community following news that the invocation at Obama’s inauguration would be delivered by Rick Warren, who strongly opposes same-sex marriage. “I am surprised how awful at Rick Warren is on LGBT issues,” Geto said. “This I think will probably be received by the community as a meaningful appointment.”

Geto noted that several other openly gay people have been appointed to jobs in the administration. Also, Geto said a lesbian couple will be among the guests Obama will host during inaugural festivities and featured prominently as representatives of the American public.