Why is the story of the stimulus still important? It plays into at least three different narratives about the Obama administration and the economy that matter to our understanding of the tumultuous economic debate and the 2012 reelection. First, a few reports have suggested that it was political constraints, and not economics, that limited the stimulus to $800 billion. Lizza's story suggests that $800 billion was considered the largest possible stimulus by both political and economic standards. The most influential voices in the administration considered a larger stimulus not only impossible, politically, but dangerous, substantively.



The second story is a critique you'll hear on the left as often as the right: The White House promised that the stimulus would save us from 9 percent unemployment and instead it allowed 10 percent unemployment. Lizza's story adds to evidence that the administration clearly underestimated the size of this recession. Summers wrote to the president that the economy, which had lost 2 million jobs in 2008, would lose another 4 million jobs in 2009 without a stimulus. By July, the economy was already 4 million jobs in the hole. The economy shed 5 million jobs in the full year, even after passing the largest stimulus plan detailed in Summer's memo. Conservatives see this as a failure of stimulus policy, and they might be right. I tend to see it as evidence that the stimulus, while record-setting, was still too small.

The final narrative is about Obama's relationship with the Republican caucus. The president's most important lesson in politics was arguably his first lesson, when zero House Republicans voted for his stimulus bill. Of the three Republicans who voted for it in the Senate, one, Arlen Specter, would become a Democrat before the end of the year. Three months after the president was elected to uncover the latent unity in U.S. politics, he discovered instead that the only unity in Washington existed in the House GOP, and it was, from the onset, dead-set against him. And so, three years later, the president is running as an unsentimental populist, as leaks of his State of the Union speech suggest, not just because he considers it a superior vehicle for his economic policy, but also because the message of hope has been rendered hopeless.

