By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog 

At least, as President Obama showed last week, you can talk to the House Republicans and have a decent policy conversation. Not so the band of 40 Senate Republicans--soon to become 41, with Scott Brown of Massachusetts joining their ranks today. 

Sweet reason just ain't their cup of tea. 

I am not excusing the Senate Democrats when I say the Senate Republicans are a truly intransigent group under the genteel veneer. A closer look at the way they have bottled up the nation's business shows they are breaking the spirit of fair play, with our republic getting more fragile by the day. It has never been quite this bad before, which is why the American people don't know a strong-willed minority of lawmakers is actively stopping and making naught of legislation, pressing as it may be. My colleague and editor Robert Schlesinger has explained the fallacy of the Senate filibuster in this space crisply and clearly, pointing out that a so-called "supermajority" of 60 is considered necessary for even an up or down vote. That is how the Senate Democrats passed a healthcare bill by the skin of their teeth late last year. Yet even before Brown painted his state crimson, the yearlong effort had languished and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy never saw the cause of his life signed into law.

By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Tonight at his second State of the Union address, President Barack Obama needs to roll out something humble to the American people, add some self-deprecating charm, then pinch with a dash of sorrow and sprinkle with old-fashioned optimism. At the end of the day, baking this classic pie may be the way to get out of the populist lock-up by sunrise.
 
(Consult Master Chef Bill Clinton if there are any doubts about my pie recipe. Nobody equals him for wooing a world of woe during a State of the Union Address.)
 
Lately, the meta-message from the Obama White House goes something like this: "Hey, I never promised you a Rose Garden, or a public option, or another Democratic senator from Massachusetts, or that this recession would ever end."
 
At a point of loss writ large just a year after his shimmering presidency began, Obama needs to show the American people a side they haven't met before. Not the dazzling wordsmith on the world stage in Oslo or Berlin. Not the young man with a fabulous future ahead. Not the Chicago maestro of cool. All that loses charm if your house or job are on the line, or if your son or daughter is deployed to serve in the renewed Afghanistan war.

By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Yesterday's showstopper in Massachusetts was the culmination of a grand, long-running political drama. Two Januarys ago, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy touched the shoulder of young Sen. Barack Obama with some stardust, bestowing his blessing and the Camelot glow on his presidential campaign. Just last January, Obama was sworn in as president amid euphoria that has vanished faster than flowers. A year ago today, Washington was floating on arctic air. Weeping frozen tears and hugging strangers was the thing to do on the National Mall as hundreds of thousands travelled millions of miles to witness the first African-American to become president of the United States. The world watched as America celebrated with more joie de vivre than anyone not alive in 1945 could remember.

And now this January, the president took a direct blow to that glow. The Senate seat held by Kennedy and his brother, John F. Kennedy, was just lost to a Republican. The symbolism is not insurmountable, but the timing is like pure Irish tragedy. The loss comes home to the White House and strikes at the story, even myth, that has grown up around Obama ever since Kennedy connected him to the family legend.

By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

A year ago, euphoria broke out all over, remember? I saved some year-old notes to bottle the moment in history. See if they help take you back to a bright shining day that now seems distant, or as a friend put it, "quite some time ago."

From my journal:

The way they walked at the break of Tuesday, Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, said it all without words. Thousands streamed into the Washington winter sunrise walking like thunder toward the Capitol for the high noon swearing-in of President Barack Obama. Then it swelled to a multitude of two million on a long civilian march. The body language translated to plain English: we the people are taking back this town and country today. A "sharp sparkle" (to quote the Inaugural poet) floated in the arctic air.

As I woke early that day, I felt a stir listening to the conversation between two lovely, fiery houseguests as they dressed for a date with history they each crossed many miles to keep. One, a public defender in Los Angeles, is the granddaughter of a man of color born 100 years ago in the Jim Crow era. He wrote for African-American newspapers in Pittsburgh and other cities. She said she felt a "responsibility" to her dignified late grandfather to be nowhere but there that day. She made me realize many in the throng brought the spirits of loved ones. Obama won her over only after hearing his sensible wife Michelle speak. "She wouldn't marry just anybody," she said.

By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

President Obama will appease a furious former Vice President Dick Cheney today if if he utters three words in his remarks on the state of our national security and intelligence: "war on terror."

Don't do it—three words of free advice, Mr. President. That's ground you cannot give to your chief ideological enemy here at home. As we know from a simple yet loaded term like "9/11," language matters. Cheney once owned the struggle he calls the "war on terror," and he wishes to take it away from you.

Cheney's grimly determined to set in stone this appellation, which he and former President Bush invented and declared on an "invisible" enemy with "shadowy" networks days after Sept. 11, 2001. In a rousing address to Congress on the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Bush asserted this "war on terror" unilaterally, and the nation hasn't been the same since. Not one member of Congress challenged this dark formulation, so spooked were we all by what 19 young Arab men did with boxcutters. Exactly one senator, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, voted against the Patriot Act, which was not far behind.

By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The contrarian senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, confounded friends and foes by flying in the eye of a snowstorm--alone against even his own crowd as the Senate nears a Christmas Eve vote on healthcare reform. A coalition of Connecticut rabbis couldn't change his mind on opposing the public option and Medicare buy-in. That's roughly the talk and take around town as Lieberman single-handedly forced the Senate Democratic caucus to forego those parts in their version of healthcare reform. Some liberals consider this signing away the heart and soul of the goal. The whole thing is rupturing the "comity" of his divided colleagues. Some Democrats seem surprised, even though the Independent is not one of them.

By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The news struck like a Dickensian knell right in time for Christmas: the abrupt closure of Editor & Publisher, the fine authoritative journal that covered the American newspaper industry for more than a century. Don't they know that newspapers are the republic's lifeblood, ever since the glory days of the 1790s?

The Nielson Company, corporate owner of the shuttered publication, played Scrooge to the hilt. It also announced the demise of Kirkus Reviews, a respected trade journal for the book publishing industry and another boon to a literate citizenry.

Many journalists like me, who will never get the ink out of their blood, are left with little except scant hopes and dreamlike memories in a bleak, fallow season for our field. As a refugee from the Baltimore Sun writing in Washington, I picture the paper in a time of high cotton—with a couple of Pulitzer Prizes to greet new hires in our first two springs about a decade ago. After covering a ghastly "50 cents" murder trial early on, I was sent out to write a tulip garden story—80,000 bulbs in a feature headlined "Rhapsody in Bloom"—to see the other side of life.