Yesterday, the House unanimously voted to reject the ~$800 billion economic stimulus package. Liberal commentators have been saying, essentially, that if the Republicans don’t want to play ball, the Democrats can, and should, pretty much play without them. And as Nate Silver pointed out, quoting the AP article, this doesn’t look good on their parts. And the fact that it’s unanimous makes it look like it was scripted, even if it wasn’t.

Assuming it was scripted, I imagine they were hoping for the reaction to go something like “Barack Obama couldn’t get a single Republican to vote for his stimulus package–what a failure on bipartisanship on his count!” I also imagine they were banking on the idea that, if it fails, suddenly they look prescient.

They did not take into account two things. First, Obama is very popular right now–given. So nobody is likely to spin this into an anti-Obama story unless they already dislike him. And the media doesn’t dislike him. Second, and this is probably the important part: a unanimous vote looks like posturing. I’m not convinced it will look good for them if the package fails. If anything, they might be blamed for it somehow. That’s obstructionism at its finest.

Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe just none of them liked it. But I know what the narrative’s going to be from here.