Criticism of the Obama stimulus package has come from all sides. As the economy languishes with a weak jobs recovery, the program has come under sharper attacks, both from the left and right.
But here's what I don't get. The plan was widely attacked because it didn't spend its money fast enough. The chorus on this was loud and long--too much money would be pushed into next year and we wouldn't see anything substantive right now, when we needed it.
Now, the tone has changed. From both the left and the right, I hear the message that the stimulus plan has pretty much run its course, it didn't do anything, and we'll go into next year as bad as this year. The right naturally says, "We told you it would never work." And the left says, "We told you it wasn't enough, you needed to do more."
Well, which is it? Did we not spend it fast enough, or is it already spent?
I tend to think Obama has been too timid about a lot of things, but I also recognize that I and others who say that could very well be wrong. The man may have uncanny patience. He's been in office 10 months. He inherited an economy that conservative governance for the last 28 years had essentially wrecked. One third of all bank deposits had been squandered by a cabal of greed-mongers, idiots, and fraudsters. Poof! Just gone. Had it not been for the long reach of the New Deal--yes, I think the ghost of FDR was channeled into Bush, Bernanke, and Paulson last year--Obama would have been standing on the Capitol steps looking out on a country with virtually no economy at all.
We need patience. Not everything can be fixed instantly. I have this hunch that the first quarter of 2010 is going to be surprisingly robust. A decent holiday shopping season. A burst of hiring. More revenue in federal coffers than expected. More jobs than expected. Political victories for the White House on health care and financial reform.
It seems to me that most mainstream analysts out there see what they have always seen--the end of their nose and their own wishful thinking. That's about it. Right now, it's fun to bash the administration, report every blip in a poll that shows some nitwit independents have changed their mind about Obama, and think the recovery will be slow because we're used to Republican recoveries anyway (which were not recoveries for working people).
Barack Obama understands that this country needs to fix three things: health care, energy, and finance. I have a lot of confidence in him on the first two. On the third one, I really wish he would kick Summers and Geithner out into the street and bring in some people who would really scare the Wall Street criminal enterprise. He probably won't, and we'll get some lukewarm reform.
But as Jack Nicholson, playing the U.S. president, said in Mars Attacks, "Two out of three ain't bad."
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