Charles Krauthammer has written a devastating column today, which encapsulates both the problems with President Obama’s “stimulus” package and, more broadly, the end of Obama’s magical mystery tour. Krauthammer puts it this way:

[M]ore damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination… The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington…. After Obama’s miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell — and that this president told better than anyone. I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.