Last week, growing impatient and testy over President Obama’s efforts to achieve bipartisanship in Congress on the stimulus package, Maureen Dowd argued that instead of trying to reach out to Republicans, “Mr. Obama should have written up a kosher (that is, pork-free) bill that Americans could trust–and Republicans couldn’t as easily mock–and jammed it through.” This is the Clinton political approach. 50% plus .01% is as much of a win as any other. It worked out just about the way Dowd wanted, but Obama was a little subtler in his approach. Whereas Dowd would have steamrolled into Washington without regard to the hundreds of other elected lawmakers, Obama extended an open hand, not a clenched fist.

While it didn’t end up working, America watched as President Obama tried to make it work. Which meant a lot. He reached across the aisle, as they say. The problem is no one reached back.

But the President responded. He took decisive action in the face of diminishing bipartisan returns, coming out strongly against the GOP for its stall tactics week before last, then harnessing his popularity to take his case to the people, first in Indiana, then Florida, then Illinois. And it worked. A piece of legislation of unprecedented scope and scale, is now on the President’s desk.

Not bad for only being in office a couple of weeks. But the linchpin is that, unlike Bill Clinton, Obama has been able to appear bipartisan in intention and sentiment during this process, even as he failed actually to prompt any notable aisle-stepping.

Still, many believe that the President’s efforts to go beyond party lines could come at the expense of campaign promises to usher in real change. The President’s choice of administration officials is a popular target. Frank Rich, for example, has been beating up on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who not only failed to pay his taxes, but also “in his oversight of teetering Wall Street institutions.”

I don’t blame Giethner for what happened on Wall Street in 2008, but his unresolved tax issues were disappointing. The real problem with Geithner came this week with what he said, didn’t say and how he didn’t say it, during his announcement of the financial recovery plan. It was totally devoid of detail or certainty. And the manner in which Geithner spoke–closed posture, scripted, and otherwise ill-at-ease–inspired little confidence. In fact, it made me nervous.

Additionally, there doesn’t appear to be much daylight between Secretary Paulson’s “plan” and Geithner’s. As reported by the Washington Post:

Many of the specific policies Geithner offered were tweaks, adjustments or continuations of Paulson’s strategy. And the more novel elements of the Geithner plan — the creation of an entity with public and private money to buy up bad assets from banks, a “stress test” of 20 or so of the nation’s largest banks, and $50 billion to prevent foreclosures — came with so few details about how they would work that it contributed to the very public anxiety and investor uncertainty that Geithner criticized.

I’m not even sure it’s sensible to say Geithner’s plan is a “continuation” of Paulson’s because Paulson, like John McCain during the 2008 election, never had a plan. Rather, he did a lot of lurching around in response to the crisis–first we were going to buy the bad assets but then, no, that was too risky; we’d have to invest wisely for the American people, let’s inject cash; but then that wasn’t working, so Paulson reconsidered. And so forth.

Here’s the fact–unless we want to continue to bail-out large companies, on an ad-hoc basis, one by one, the bad assets of a select few large banks must be purchased by the US government. Cash injections haven’t worked and won’t work because they miss the mark; the bad assets remain and, like a 300 lb. ball and chain, continue to weigh down the banking institutions, discouraging them from doing the lending that’s required to revivify the economy.

People like to compare the current financial mess to the Great Depression, but it’s completely and categorically different in its scope and specific nature. Alan Greenspan is scratching his head, and Government is too. No one really knows what is happening, or what to do. And that is ultimately why Geithner’s plan was pitched at such a general level. Because the Obama team knows Geithner will probably need some room within which to lurch from time to time, and they don’t want to tie themselves down just yet.

And we musn’t forget Geithner’s main squeeze, Larry Summers, with whom so many Progressives seem to have a problem. Appointed as head of the White House’s National Economic Council, Summers is no angel. As Clinton’s Treasury Secretary he was a fierce deregulator who ushered in the repeal of Glass-Steagall at the tail end of the Clinton administration, paving the way for mega- one-stop-shopping bank conglomerates like Citi and AIG to become too big to fail, too complex to regulate and too risky to tolerate. (Summers was also fired from Harvard University for claiming men were better at math than women.)

But, most agree, Summers is incredibly bright and he has the right experience for the job. Shouldn’t we hold our aspersions in reserve until Summers makes a policy error or other error while serving in an official capacity? We elected Barack Obama because of his judgment. It’s time to trust it.