If Only Obama Had Turned Over The Economy To President McCain

And when David Brooks says "Obama should have listened to voters in 2008" he means "David Brooks" as he soft-pedals his idiotic what-if under President Obama McCain.

Many of the president-elect’s advisers had been reading histories of the New Deal. They had ambitious plans to address the crisis: federal jobs programs, new building projects, new spending initiatives. This was no time to worry about deficits, they said. This was an opportunity to address needs that had been neglected for decades.

Obama, in this fanciful version, held up his hand. He told his aides to put away the history books and reject the New Deal comparisons. Unlike in 1932, Americans today have a raging distrust of Washington, he observed. Living through a crisis caused by excessive debt, they will viscerally recoil at the prospect of federal debt without end. “Somehow,” Obama concluded, “we have to address the crisis without further terrifying the American people.”

The stimulus package, he continued, should rely heavily on cutting payroll taxes. This, he argued, will send a quick jolt to the economy without concentrating power in Washington. It will deliver a sharp psychological boost to the middle class. It might even be bipartisan. Obama noted that John McCain had a $445 billion stimulus plan along these lines and his fellow Republican senator, Mel Martinez, a $713 billion plan. 

See, tax cuts don't create debt, brooks continues, so Americans would have been able to clap their way to victory with an even smaller stimulus plan than what we had, which Republicans wouldn't have tried to stop, and they would have been so grateful to the President for abandoning Nancy Pelosi and health care reform completely that they totally would have signed off on the Energy bill too.

No really, that's his plan.  If only Obama had listened to voters in 2008 and let the Republicans run the country (as they clearly meant to do by electing Democrats) the Democrats would be even more popular now than they were two years ago!

And people wonder why I think David Brooks is an idiot.

Look, the real problem is Obama half-assed the stimulus from the beginning so it only halfway worked,  He half-assed health care reform and scrapped the public option, he half-assed Wall Street reform so that's not going to work when the next bank crash comes and he didn't bother with energy, climate, or immigration reform (and now he won't get the chance to.)

And now, with his back against the wall, he's half-assing it again with these tax cuts.

Great.