And then blames Republicans — after admitting Obama’s policies were a failure the first time –for refusing to give the Dems another shot:

Fundamentally, the stimulus was an attempt to grow our way out of the recession, and our housing policies were an attempt to reduce the debt that was keeping us in the recession. It was what I call “offensive policy.” In retrospect, however, we could have used more “defensive policy.” We were so focused on getting out of the crisis that we ignored some of the policies that would have helped us endure it.
Chief among these were policies to either save jobs or create them directly. In the first case, we could have taken a page out of the German playbook and launched a program to pay employers who cut hours rather than fired workers. In the second case, the government could have provided more help to state and local governments, which have lost more than 500,000 jobs, and tried direct-employment schemes like Christina Romer’s idea to hire 100,000 teacher’s aides.
Finally, the Federal Reserve acted with extraordinary speed and aggressiveness to prevent the crisis from becoming a calamity. The Fed has been more tentative in its efforts to speed the recovery. A more aggressive Federal Reserve could have used everything from jawboning the market to purchasing larger quantities of housing and corporate bonds to ending interest payments for banks that are simply socking away the money.
Would any or all of these policies have turned the unrecovery into a real recovery? They certainly could have helped. The good news, of course, is that they could help now, too. The problem isn’t that we are out of policy ammunition. It’s that Republicans in Congress don’t want to pull the trigger.

The whole piece here.