Obama interviewed on Air Force One, Friday afternoon. Very smart, not saplike at all.....

"In terms of what I've learned on the politics of it," he said, "I think what I've learned is that I've got a great team because we moved a very big piece of legislation through Congress in record time."

His bragging rights were easily justified. You'd have to go back to Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s or Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s to find a more sweeping, more expensive and more quickly enacted package of what Republicans call "new spending" and Democrats call "new investments."

"And that was not easy to do."

No, it wasn't. Not even when the vote fell almost totally along party lines, despite sacrifices by the Democratic majority of about $100 billion of pet Democratic projects and programs.

"And I think the end product is not a hundred percent of what we would want, but it is a very good start on moving things forward."

As for bipartisanship? "I made every effort to reach out to Republicans early to get their input and to get their buy-in," Obama said. "I think that there were some senators and House members who have a sincere philosophical difference with the idea of any government role in boosting demand in the economy. They don't believe in (John Maynard) Keynes and they're still fighting FDR.... I think we can disagree without being disagreeable on that front."

In other words, the president appears to have found that, given a choice, members of America's conservative major party tend to vote like conservatives.

"I also think that there was a decision made that was political and tactical on their part where they said, 'You know what, if we can enforce conformity among our ranks then it will invigorate our base and will potentially give us some political advantage, either short term or long term,' " Obama said. "And whether that's a smart strategy, I think you should ask them."

And it is not hard to imagine what they would say.

"The last point I would make, though, is that given the urgency of the situation right now, my consistent goal throughout this process is: Are we getting the most immediate, most effective relief possible to American families who are losing their jobs, losing their homes, losing their health care?," he said. "I welcome Republican participation in that process, but ultimately I'm answerable to the American people. And my determination was to get it done, and I think that we're going to get it done."

Obama is the third president in a row to come to Washington promising to bring more bipartisanship, then fail to close the deal. Did he make a mistake? Should he have defined bipartisanship as warmed relations between the parties instead of actually winning Republican votes? Obama did not say.

But he did say that he thought the GOP party-line vote was a fait accompli long before it was taken. "Look," he said, "once a decision was made by the Republican leadership to have a party-line vote -- a decision that I think occurred before I met with them -- then I'm not sure that there was a whole host of things that we were going to do that was going to make a difference.

"But again, my bottom line was not how pretty the process was; my bottom line was am I getting help to people who need it."

"Going forward, each and every time we've got an initiative I'm going to go to both Democrats and Republicans and I'm going to say, here's my best argument for why we need to do this."

Asked whether his experience had changed his expectations of winnable Republican support or how he might win it, he responded sagely. "You know, I am an eternal optimist," he said. "That doesn't mean I'm a sap."

As our laughter subsided, he described his goal? "Assume the best, but prepare for a whole range of different possibilities."

That's not an original thought, but it's durable.

Asked if he foresees a time when more drastic action might be required to save the financial markets, like the Japan or Swedish models, Obama explored the positives and negatives of each. Japan failed to intervene forcefully enough in the 1990s- "they sort of paper things over and never really bit the bullet"--and fell into an economic "lost decade."

Like many economists on the left, Obama found a "good argument" in Sweden's model, which temporarily nationalized its failed banks, then sold them off one-by-one. But here, too, he found a big problem: "They only had a handful of banks; we've got thousands of banks. The scale, the magnitude, of what we're dealing with is much bigger."

"But here's the bottom line," he said. "We will do what works."

Later he elaborated, "I think what you can say is, I will not allow our financial system to collapse. And we are going to do whatever is required to get credit flowing again so that companies and consumers can do their business and we can get this economy back on track."