That was an enlivened President Obama we saw earlier this evening -- impassioned, indignant, non-professorial. And enlivened he should have been, because the American economy trembles on the brink of a double-dip recession, and the Republican opposition has been seized by an ideology that would erode what remains of the once-great American middle class. Not to mention, Obama’s own political future and that of his party are on the line as well.

For the past week, the White House has been deliberately low-balling its estimates of what the plan the president unveiled tonight would actually include. When word started getting around this afternoon that this new stimulus would be set at $447 billion for the next year -- a rate higher than the $787-billion-over-two-years stimulus that Congress enacted in 2009 -- leaders of groups representing the Democratic base breathed a sigh of relief. The size and the substance of this new stimulus give Obama and his party the ability not only to rally many of his disenchanted core supporters but to reach out to voters in the middle of the political spectrum.

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