ineffective (Bush/Obama) "stimulus" and 6.5 weeks until the GOP gets Obama to quit hurting himself and us

We're more than 2.5 years into various "stimuli"; how much do people need to see? The answer, at least in terms of Democratic electoral prospects, is about 6.5 weeks. Then, we'll see if the GOP has learned anything and can help Obama change course (as they did for Clinton in 1994).

From the WSJ editorialists...

So two months before an election, and 19 months after the mother of all spending programs, President Obama said yesterday he's rolling out one more plan to stimulate the economy...the effort itself is a tacit admission that his earlier proposals have flopped...

The recession preceded Mr. Obama's Inaugural by 13 months, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, and so did the President's fiscal policy ideas. George W. Bush got there first. In February 2008, he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed on a $168 billion combination of federal spending and temporary tax rebates that were supposed to maintain growth through the housing market decline that election year.

Larry Summers, who would later become Mr. Obama's chief economic adviser...[and] Peter Orszag, then at the Congressional Budget Office...made the same case...Stimulus I failed.

Enter Stimulus II, the $814 billion plan that was also supposed to make up for lost private demand. It too was a combination of one-time tax rebates and spending, mostly on social programs like Medicaid rather than on "shovel-ready projects." Mr. Summers promised this would have a 1.5 "multiplier" effect on GDP growth, and White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein famously predicted the spending would keep the jobless rate below 8%.

All during this time, the Federal Reserve was also feeding the economy with unprecedented monetary stimulus...Congress passed other industry-specific stimulus bills—cash-for-clunkers, the $8,000 home-buyer's tax credit, mortgage payment relief, and jobless pay up to 99 weeks....

In sum, never before has government spent so much and intervened so directly...yet the results have been mediocre at best. In return for adding nearly $3 trillion in federal debt in two years, we still have 14.9 million unemployed.

As for blaming the Republicans, with only 40 and then 41 Senators they couldn't stop so much as a swinging door. The GOP couldn't even block the recent $10 billion teachers union bailout....No Administration since LBJ's in 1965 has passed so much of its agenda in one Congress—which is precisely the problem.

...the real roots of Mr. Obama's economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government....