Perhaps no part of Obama's economic stimulus package is as important as the billions of dollars in aid it will provide to state governments. The National Governors Association said in December that state budgets have not looked so bad for 25 years. But the stimulus package will not plug all the holes. Most of the money that can be applied to state budget shortfalls is contained in the Medicaid and "Fiscal Stabilization Fund" portions of the package, which amount to $87 billion and $54 billion, respectively. According to a report released Friday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), projected state deficits over the next 30 months will total about $350 billion. "The amount of funding that will go to states to help them maintain current activities," says the report, "is approximately $135 billion to $145 billion -- or about 40 percent of projected state deficits."

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Eight years later, Pelosi went back out on the GOP campaign trail and into the lion's den, in the waning days of John McCain's failed bid for the White House. In her latest film, "Right America: Feeling Wronged," which debuts on HBO Monday night, Pelosi attends McCain and Sarah Palin rallies in 28 states and puts her microphone in the faces of some very passionate conservatives. As defeat looms, she watches the Republican base go through a very public grieving process, with most of the stages that psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described -- denial, depression and a whole lot of anger -- but not very much acceptance. Salon spoke to Pelosi by phone.

Early in the film Sean Hannity points to you in front of a McCain crowd and says, "That's Nancy Pelosi's daughter." And you respond, "You're going to get me lynched." Did you ever feel endangered or like there was any personal animus toward you during the making of this film?

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Brave souls named Beck and Hannity and Limbaugh have raised the alarm: Socialism will soon be loosed upon the land. What is this "socialism" of which they -- and Malkin, McCain and Morris -- warn? Socialism is apparently what is created when a president you do not like spends money on things of which you do not approve.

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What Time does not explain, however, is that Bush has returned to a state far different from the one he left eight years ago. A rapid rise in the Latino electorate promises to turn the state purple in the foreseeable future, and the Republicans have lost seats in the state legislature in each of the last three election cycles. But more importantly, having placed all its chips on the wrong party, in 2009 the state has ceded nearly all of its national influence.

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RT: this was such a stupid gambit
that it hurt the thing she always had going for her

MS: yes

RT: which was her reputation for class and general likability

MS: the image is gone
if she was going to do this

RT: which was perhaps fostered by the fact that she never opened her mouth

MS: she had to do it

RT: right
this just looks weak

MS: and then become someone new
now she is neither the old or the new
she was a memory, all gauzy
then a disappointing reality
but maybe a senator
now only a disappointing reality

RT: exactly

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But if Obama wants to know how the New Deal was actually forged, New York Times editor Adam Cohen's book "Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America" is an indispensable primer. According to Cohen, the original New Deal, which forever transformed the role of the federal government, was not born out of the sort of patient planning for which Obama is known. In a phone interview, Salon asked Cohen, an assistant editorial page editor at the paper, to draw comparisons between Obama and Roosevelt, and between 1933 and 2009.

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Yet, as more than one observer, including former Salonista Jake Tapper, has noted, Obama has made statements about Hamas in the past, and they've been almost unequivocally negative. Would the Obama White House be saying anything much different from what current White House spokesperson Gordon Johndroe said today, which is that the Bush administration holds Hamas responsible for breaking a cease-fire and urges the Israelis to avoid civilian casualties?

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In light of the GOP's problems with nonwhite voters, then, its approach to choosing the next Republican National Committee chairperson seems a little odd. The contest now includes a couple of black guys who lost statewide races by large margins and a couple of white guys who have problems with black guys.

On one side of the ledger are Michael Steele, who lost the Maryland senate race by 10 points in 2006, and Ken Blackwell, who lost the Ohio governor's race by 23 the same year. Presumably choosing Steele or Blackwell as RNC chairman would send a message of inclusivity to African-American voters, though we see how well that worked out for Mel Martinez and Latino voters a few years ago.

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Thirty-two percent of respondents picked Obama, while runner-up George Bush notched just 5 percent. In further parallels with 1952, that matches Harry Truman's performance in the Gallup Poll. Bush has long had only Truman as company as the least-popular president in contemporary opinion polls. His ratings, which have languished in the 20s and 30s, are similar to those that Truman earned during his second term, as troops were bogged down in Korea. Bush's numbers, however, have stayed lower, and for longer, than Truman's.

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