But it's too soon to do the victory dance because it appears that in an effort to please everybody, nobody is 100% pleased. Supporters claim the bill is about saving or creating 3.5 million jobs. The opposition says it's about nothing but more spending.

Obama may have won the battle for bill passage, but he lost the war on bipartisanship. In fact, some say that his efforts to woo Republicans, to bow to their demand for the inclusion of more tax cuts than originally drafted, may have been the very thing that weakened his position . . . and the bill itself.

Some economists think the cuts demanded by the opposition may have diluted the bill to the point of being inadequate, and that it might not be enough to achieve the desired results. It's especially troubling because those cuts seemed to be forced for political reasons rather than practical ones.

And the problem going forward is this: the whole debating process became such an ugly bipartisan spectacle, if the bill does fall short it's hard to imagine Obama being able to get any consensus on future attempts to stimulate the economy.

What will the bill actually accomplish? Where is the economy headed? We don't need a crystal ball to get those answers—not when we have the Congressional Budget Office churning out their chilling predictions. They believe that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could potentially produce and what it will actually produce.

If you thought a $787 billion stimulus bill sounded like a staggering figure, you would be right. But a $2.9 trillion shortfall has a way of snapping things into perspective. There is no way a stimulus bill of the current size is going to bail us out of this colossal disaster.

If Tim Geithner's announcement about how to rescue the banks and get credit flowing again, had actually turned out to be a plan for how to rescue the banks and get credit flowing again, there might be a little more confidence in the hearts and wallets of taxpayers. But that anxiously awaited announcement fizzled into a cloud of vague dust.

But let's not be too quick to declare Obama's presidency a failure. We know how time seems to speed up as we get older, but hold on a minute. With so many things happening simultaneously, it's hard to remember that the man has only been in office for three weeks. In that short time, he has managed to get a stimulus package all but approved, the size of which is so enormous it would have been unthinkable just a few short weeks ago. He's staffed up his cabinet at record speed, albeit with a few hiccups in the process, and he's hammering out the details for rescuing a banking system that is in a crisis the likes of which we've never experienced.

This administration has already proven and admitted that it's not perfect, it has inherited near total chaos, and it's dancing as fast as it can. But the partisan bickering continues in a time when unity is critical. Meanwhile we can only wait and hope that the pieces start falling into place before the economy unravels its way into a depression.