The Two Crown Princesses?

Via Paul Krugman, here's Rep. David Obey (D-WI) with his account of the early-2009 stimulus debate:

When Obama took over we were still in the middle of a free fall. So his Treasury people came in and his other economic people came in and said "Hey, we need a package of $1.4 trillion."

We started sending suggestions down to OMB waiting for a call back. After two and a half weeks, we started getting feedback. We put together a package that by then the target had been trimmed to $1.2 trillion.

And then [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel said to me, "Geez, do you really think we can afford to come in with a package that big, isn’t it going to scare people?"

I said, "Rahm, you will need that shock value so that people understand just how serious this problem is." They wanted to hold it to less than $1 trillion.

Then [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter and the two crown princesses from Maine [Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins] took it down to less than $800 billion. Spread over two and a half years, that's a hell of a lot of money, but spread over two and a half years in an economy this large, it doesn't have a lot of fiscal power.

Obey seems, conveniently, to have forgotten the role of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) in the policy mess.