It’s not the New Deal. Or the New Frontier. Or the Great Society. Or, heaven help us, the Reagan Revolution. But I’m hoping after last night’s news conference, the passage of a stimulus package in the Senate and today’s rollout of a new TARP bailout that this is the Real Deal—a viable plan to restore some rationality to our economic life together as a nation.

Perhaps after the debacle of the last presidency it’s too easy to give President Obama high marks for engaging in a fruitful discussion of economics, foreign policy and, yes, even A-Rod’s steroid use. (He’s concerned about the message it sends to children.) For showing his understanding of the dynamics of Congressional politics, for using one of his vice president’s gaffes to make a point that no program’s perfect. This give and take went on for a full hour before he thanked the media and a heavy foot could be heard coming down from the podium as he strode off.

Follow up:

Okay, I’m a sucker for competence. And eloquence. I give Obama an A plus for Articulate. He is cooler than Bill Clinton (whose spell over me was pretty powerful), and he’s in a bigger mess. After courting Republicans with formal dinners, drinks in the White House, chats in the Oval Office and even a Super Bowl party, Obama got only three of their votes in the first round. And two of those votes came from Republican women, who know a thing or two about compromise. Thank you, Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. And, although it pains me to say this, thank you, Senator Arlen Specter. (He must have noticed things are trending Democratic in his home state of Pennsylvania.)

Can anyone imagine Al Gore or John Kerry receiving the deference the president showed his defeated opponent John McCain? A formal dinner, no less, in his honor before the inauguration! Of course McCain accepted, and turned up smiling at the swearing in. But now he speaks of the burden the stimulus will place on future generations as if Republicans had not squandered the surplus left in 2000 by the Clinton administration and dug a mountain of debt for an unnecessary war and tax cuts for families like his. Where were those principles then? Obama said last night that he had no patience for such talk.

Oddly, some of the president’s fiercest opposition comes from elected officials in states where the economic pain is deepest. South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsay Graham had the nerve to say Obama was AWOL in promoting the stimulus package on Capitol Hill. Didn’t he get invited to the Super Bowl Party? I wondered when he said the stimulus stinks. Last night, Graham got his response when the president lamented that people were too short-sighted to see how renovating crumbling schools could stimulate the economy. ($19 billion for this was cut in the compromise.) “…I visited a school down in South Carolina that was built in the 1850s. Kids are still learning in that school, as best they can. When the railroad — it's right next to a railroad, and when the train runs by, the whole building shakes and the teacher has to stop teaching for a while.”

And when the president spoke earlier yesterday in Elkhart, Indiana, where the unemployment rate soared from 4.7 percent to more than 15 percent, the state’s two senators, Republican Richard Lugar and Blue Dog Democrat Evan Bayh were not on the podium. Bayh at least voted for the stimulus, but Lugar opposed it. Among other problems, Obama said the recreational vehicle industry centered in Indiana is stymied because banks won’t loan willing consumers the money to buy an RV.

Which brings us to today’s rollout from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who in contrast to the president, wears his anxiety on his face and rumpled clothing. His plan by all accounts goes a lot easier on the banks whose folly has led us to the brink than people like White House political director David Axelrod hoped. Geithner not only disappoints those who would like to nationalize the banks but those who would like to visit heavy oversight on their spending of our trillions. What is it about this Wonder Boy that led Obama to defend his tax lapses and buy his conviction that establishing some strict rules for bankers’ spending was a bad idea? Does Obama’s good friend Warren Buffet know how to run an economy as well as he can turn a buck?

This is one time that it makes me nervous that Obama never went to business school. We won’t know if he made the right call until those RV buyers get their loans, small to middling businesses get the capital they need to expand, and college students find the funds to return to school—or not.

As one who remembers all too well the choices the Johnson administration was forced to make between guns for Vietnam and butter for the hungry at home (and how a president’s pride kept him from walking away from a fight), I’m hoping that this time we get it right, that the stimulus and the bailout lead us to a stronger nation by way of investing in jobs and health care and green solutions to our ailing planet as well as our economy. But that’s just the domestic piece.

Obama said last night that this is not the world he envisioned for his presidency, and I’m sure it isn’t. I can’t imagine a slogan he could slap on the challenges he faces.