Obama sounds a few partisan notes here, but he can't help undercutting a progressive agenda in the following ways:

* Playing up the virtue that most of the stimulus jobs are in the blessed private sector
* Framing healthcare only as a "cost" issue (and not, for example, an access issue)
* Playing the "bickering" card, which once again bolsters the disempowering, juvenile "food fight" misconception

Stuff like this is good, if terribly belated after two years of honeyed but retrograde rhetoric. More like it, please:

Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They have taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars. And they have brought our economy to a halt.

Stuff like this is a welcome change, too:

Are these folks serious? Is it any wonder we haven't had a real energy policy in this country?

It beats the heck out of going on Fox News and saying this sort of thing:

OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.

CHRIS WALLACE: Such as.

OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation, I think that back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a lot of the way we regulated industry was top down command and control. We’re going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.

And I think that the Republican party and people who thought about the margins (ph) came with the notion that you know what, if you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives for businesses, let them figure out how they’re going to for example reduce pollution. And a cap and trade system, for example, is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.