When Resident Bush was told by military experts that the size of the fighting force he was sending to Iraq was too small - that he needed more troops if he wanted to wage his war effectively - they were dismissed, in some cases quite literally. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki - now Obama's Secretary of Veterans Affairs - was fired after he warned the administration that it would need hundreds of thousands of troops in order to be successful. It was only later, when Bush belatedly called for his "surge" and it began to bear fruit, that Gen. Shinseki was vindicated.
The uber-competent Barack Obama wants to wage his war against this devastating recession effectively, so he is listening to economic experts - and he is taking their considered advice to heart. To a person, and from both sides of the liberal/conservative divide - those whose job it is to understand economics (and I certainly don't mean senators or congressional representatives) are telling him that any stimulus meant to jolt this woeful economy - the "financial fighting force" he must send if you will - must be enormous if it is to be effective. And as Obama himself noted in his first prime time press conference, these economists include former advisors to John McCain and both Bushes.
Now, judging by his current posturing in the Senate, a President McCain might very well have ignored or fired such advisors and opted instead for a too small, tax cut laden stimulus that fit into his rigid political world-view but would have had catastrophic effects; later, after things went to Hell in a handbasket - he'd have needed an additional "surge" in order to get things working properly. And if past is prologue, we can assume that McCain would've then crowed about the success of the surge, hoping that everyone would forget his initial opposition to funding things properly from the get go.
Well unlike his inept predecessor, or his erstwhile opponent, President Obama is actually taking the experts' advice and making a good faith effort to do things right, right out of the gate, even though it's not an easy sell. While tiresome GOP politicians are, no shock, screaming that we're spending too much - and trying to score cheap political points - world class economists of all stripes have made it abundantly clear: the stimulus must be massive if it's going to work. Obama has listened and, unlike the arrogant, willfully ignorant former president, has no intention of second guessing the educated and the expert, despite the potential political consequences if a package of that scope were to fail. We can disagree about the specifics of the package itself, but any way you slice it, President Obama is, blissfully, a serious man for serious times.
Now it's entirely possible that the stimulus is, in fact (believe it or not), too small, or that specific items in the package won't work as intended, so that further monies will be needed down the road to keep the economy afloat. But the odds of that necessity have been reduced drastically because we finally have a president who gets sound advice from people who know their business and doesn't dismiss it out of hand because it gets in the way of his pre-conceived notions or plans. A president, in short, who wants to get it right the first time.
So let's just beat the crap out of the horse, despite the fact that rigor mortis has long since set in: had George Bush listened to the experts who warned him that he needed a huge initial "expenditure" of "troop capital" in order to be successful in Iraq, the subsequent surge wouldn't have been necessary and a lot of pain, heartache and devastation would've been avoided. Instead, Bush fired those experts and bulldozed ahead with his woefully inadequate, poorly thought out, but more politically palatable plan. The consequences were dire.
Thank God that in this time of global economic crisis we have a thoughtful, sober president like Barack Obama at the helm, one who puts sound policy before political ideology or gamesmanship. As Obama himself said, the last thing he wanted for his presidency was to have to come in and spend close to a trillion dollars we don't have. But rather than offer a more easy-to-swallow package at half the price (as the increasingly unserious McCain put forth) only to watch it fail spectacularly, spawning the inevitable public mea culpa and then a scramble to clean up the attendant (but avoidable) mess, we have a chief executive who believes that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right - and he's not shooting the highly knowledgeable messengers who have told him in no uncertain terms how it needs to be done.
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