As I suggested below, there are elected officials who believe or at least say a number of things I don’t consider very realistic, e.g., spending over $800 billion in a compressed period of time will have no impact on the economy, emissions of greenhouse gases and soot particles will have no impact on the human environment, economic growth in the developing world will impoverish people in the developed world, etc.

Here’s a hot tip: Powerful people like engaging these arguments because doing so allows them to avoid more difficult questions — was the ARRA cost-effective, and was Alice Rivlin right to suggest that it was too hastily drawn up and that it ought to have separated a narrow recession-fighting package focused on aid to states and extension of unemployment benefits from a sustainable infrastructure package designed to meet long-term economic priorities? Is a cap-and-trade system that includes large subsidies and credits for abatements going to work terribly well, or will it enrich a handful of corporate constituencies while making more effective alternatives less likely? And are there ways to reform our welfare state that can better address the economic anxiety experienced by the large number of workers in tradeable sectors, a category that, as Alan Blinder has argued, has expanded over the last few decades and will continue to expand in the decades to come?

The beauty of engaging over-the-top, hyperbolic arguments is that it allows you to advance half-baked ideas. Were you to engage serious, nuanced arguments, you might discover that the policies you’ve been advancing don’t meet their stated goals very well.

Rooting for a professional sports team is a gas. But rooting for a team of professional politicians is, for the pundit class, even more fun — in a sense, you can participate in the fun by maligning your political “enemies.” Imagine if it were socially acceptable for fans of the New Orleans Saints to throw Nerf balls at Peyton Manning during the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s not going to stop the guy. But it would prove very distracting. And for the Nerf ball throwers, it would also feel very, very empowering. What a way to unleash lots of pent-up energy!

Here’s the thing: I don’t think that rooting for a team of professional politicians is very edifying or very worthwhile. What I do think is important is holding powerful people accountable, whether they’re in the Bush White House or in the Obama White House or in corporate boardrooms or NEA headquarters.

So when I suggest that David Leonhardt — a tremendously smart guy — is wasting his time taking on straw man arguments, the fact that John Boehner is serving up anti-stimulus zingers is not much of a gotcha.

I’m sensitive to this in part because I remember when pro-war conservatives spent huge amounts of time taking on the notion that President Bush wanted to invade Iraq to seize its oil wealth, to expand America’s empire, or to serve Israeli interests. It was a lot of fun to tackle these arguments because they made critics of the Iraq War look like kooky conspiracy theorists. And some of them — very large numbers of them, perhaps — were kooky conspiracy theorists! But I wish that we in the pro-war camp had spent more time thinking about and not dismissing arguments about the opportunity costs of a prolonged military occupation of Iraq or the dangers posed by Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divides.

This isn’t to say that John Boehner is making the equivalent of a “blood-for-oil” argument. I don’t know if there are any meaningful equivalents when you’re talking about a federal stimulus bill that, unlike a war, is not as vividly a matter of life and death. What I’m saying is that those of us on the right did ourselves a disservice by not tackling the toughest, most challenging arguments. Instead, we chose to focus on scoring political points. And to what end?

Right now, many on the technocratic center-left are in the same mood as pro-war conservatives. We’re the serious ones. Our enemies (and it’s all about enemies) are a menace and need to be shut down before we can make any real progress, etc.

I make arguments in a spirit of helpfulness (as lame as that sounds), mostly because I want the country to get back on track and the Obama administration is the only administration we have right now.

Are Republican legislators who constantly criticize the White House helping matters? I don’t think they actually can help matters, even if they wanted to, as evidenced by the faux bipartisanship we’ve seen from both parties over the years. Rest assured, a Republican administration in these economic circumstances would probably propose all kinds of wasteful and ineffective spending to meet the needs of the political cycle. Rooting for the right team doesn’t solve the basic problem that powerful people need to watched and challenged.

The only people who can help are working in the Office of Management and Budget or the Treasury Department or the National Economic Council and other key bureaucracies. Key Democratic legislators and their staffs can also help. Everything else is noise. During the Iraq War, the best congressional Democrats could do was offer firm opposition. If someone was going to make serious anti-war arguments, it was going to be experienced national security voices within and close to the Bush administration, and one gets the impression that there wasn’t enough of that.