Mark likes to call Newsweek “ObamaWeek,” and this column by Michael Hirsh is pretty over-the-top:

Obama’s desire to begin a “post-partisan” era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending.1 This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that’s supposed to be “temporary” and “targeted”—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts requiring immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough.2 When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There’s no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles.3 It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.4
But the public isn’t hearing about that all-important distinction right now. And by the time Obama signs a bill—if he can get one approved—many Americans may have concluded that the GOP is right and that the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, as if this were just another wearying Washington debate.5 Judging from his flurry of TV appearances Tuesday night and his remarks on Wednesday, Obama himself seems to have realized belatedly that he needs to stop empathizing and take charge. After trying to put the Daschle imbroglio behind him by frankly acknowledging that he, the president, “screwed up,” Obama reminded everyone of the urgency of the moment. “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future,” he said at the White House. Obama also sought to regain the moral high ground by announcing he would limit senior executive pay at bailed-out Wall Street firms to $500,000. “We’re taking the air out of the golden parachute,” Obama said, adding that it was only “the beginning of a long term effort to examine the ways in which the means and manner of executive compensation contributed to a reckless culture…” That’s a step in the right direction. But now Obama needs to remind the American people that unless the Republicans get on board, they will bear political responsibility for failing to act in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.6

1. Uh, no. What the money gets spent on is a pretty fundamental question before the American people. Whether or not it includes a buy-American provision determines whether or not we have a trade war with the EU. This is not “stale” “haggling.”

2. See Mitch McConnell’s point that if you spent a million dollars a day from Jesus Christ’s birth to today, you still wouldn’t have spent as much as the House-passed version. It’s plenty big; in fact, the size ties into the problem Hirsh points out in a previous sentence–the amount may be so huge that the various government agencies won’t be able to spend large chunks of it anytime soon.

3. Some of us just aren’t okay with the “some waste and boondoggles are going to slip through” attitude.

4. I remember hearing a lot of that “don’t think, act now!” argument during last fall’s Wall Street bailout, and very few people are happy with how that turned out.

5. Americans are concluding the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, as if this were just another wearying Washington debate, because the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, and because this is just another wearying Washington debate, just with bigger amounts of money than usual.

6. Even if you believed that this bill was necessary to respond to our economic troubles, this ignores the fact that Democrats control the House and Senate by wide majorities. Republicans have put forth their solutions, and Pelosi and most of her members chose to ignore them. GOP lawmakers are under no obligation to sell out their principles and sign on to this dog’s breakfast of a bill so that Obama can crow about having “bipartisan support.” Neither are the ten skeptical House Democrats.