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Please, people, take a deep breath, step back and stop working yourselves into a lather about cave-ins and core principles and lines in the sand. Earlier this week, I said we should wait to see what Obama got from Republicans in tax negotiations before convicting him of terminal wimpiness. He may have dispelled that image at his combative news conference Tuesday by calling out Republicans as hostage-takers and liberal naysayers as sanctimonious purists. But that’s just the politics. Let’s look at the economic winners in this package to get to the real bottom line:

— The long-term unemployed. In an economy with 9.8 percent unemployment, with five jobless people for each job opening, they’ll get another 13 months of benefits if they need them.

— Families with children and college students. They’ll continue to get tax credits included in last year’s stimulus package for two more years.

— Lower-income working families. The stimulus package expanded assistance under the Earned Income Tax Credit. The extra help will continue for two more years, benefiting some 6.5 million working parents with 15 million children.

— Businesses. They will continue to get tax breaks included in the stimulus, and they’ll also be able to expense 100 percent of their investments in 2011 (an Obama proposal from September).

— People who have jobs. Over 155 million workers will get a one-year, two-percent cut in the payroll tax (that pays for Social Security and Medicare). That’s worth about $1,000 to the average family, Obama says.

— Everyone with income. For at least two more years, they will continue to pay lower Bush-era tax rates on income under $250,000.

Yes, yes, I know. Obama campaigned on a promise to eradicate George W. Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” from the face of the earth. It was his battle cry. It defined him and his party. And granted, he should have had some strategy in place months ago to go to the mat for something, whether it was ending the high-end tax cuts or raising the income threshold, when there was still time for a few rounds of political warfare. To be fair, though everyone has known for 10 years that all the tax cuts for everyone were due to expire Dec. 31, Obama’s party refused to vote on extending the middle-class tax cuts before the election. “I would have liked to have seen a vote before the election. I thought this was a strong position for us to take into the election, to crystalize the positions of the two parties, because I think the Democrats have better ideas,” Obama said Tuesday.

When Democrats finally brought their tax cut package to the floor a few days ago, the Senate couldn’t overcome a filibuster threat. Time was running out. Obama said his top priority is to make sure 2 million long-term unemployed don’t lose their lifelines and “tens of millions of hardworking Americans are not seeing their paychecks shrink on January 1st just because the folks here in Washington are busy trying to score political points.” The agreement gives Washington time to have the political argument over taxes, he said, without doing harm to individuals or the economy as a whole.

Some liberal interest groups have pounced on Obama and branded the deal a complete sellout. “If Obama’s theory is that Independent voters will flock to presidential weakness, mission accomplished,” wrote Adam Green, head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. His evidence: An Associated Press dispatch Monday headlined “Republicans achieve top goal in Obama tax-cut plan.” Republicans “largely dictated the terms” of the compromise though they don’t control the House, Senate or White House, the AP said.

Never mind that Republicans would have preferred a permanent extension of the high-end tax cuts instead of the two years they got. Or that they agreed to extend unemployment benefits for an unprecedented 13 months, a $56-billion expense, and did not secure spending cuts to offset the cost. Their insistence on such an offset — even as they said there was no need to offset the 10-year, $700 billion cost of the high-end tax cuts — has repeatedly held up attempts to extend the benefits, including twice since Nov. 30.

By Tuesday, the AP had its economic team on the case. New headline: “Tax deal should help economy, analysts say.” Bill Scher of the very liberal Campaign for America’s Future implored Democrats to “do the deal. For the Jobless. For the Economy.” The liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) said the plan could save or create 2.2 million jobs. The group’s ThinkProgress blog says Obama’s priorities get far more money in the deal and help 32 times as many people as the GOP’s priorities.

The size and sweep of the deal reportedly were a surprise even to those who worked it out. It will cost about as much as the $787-billion stimulus plan that the GOP opposed nearly unanimously last year. It flies in the face of all the deficit-reduction talk of recent days. It could help goose the economy. If Democrats are incensed by the idea of spending $120 billion on two years of tax cuts for the wealthy (bonus tax cuts, in CAP’s terminology), maybe they’ll feel better if they think in more general terms about how the package could spark a recovery — for both the economy and their party.

By: Jill Lawrence, Senior Correspondent, Politics Daily-December 8, 2010