Marty Feldstein, an actual conservative economist as opposed to the lunatics now pretending to be conservatives on Capitol Hill, in talk radio, and in the wingnutosphere, thinks the stimulus package that passed Congress was something less than half as big as it needed to be, and therefore thinks we need another stimulus package.
I suspect that this is the Obama strategy on the stimulus (and hope, with less conviction, that it’s the Obama strategy on the banking system as well): let the necessity for drastic action become so overwhelmingly obvious that he looks as if he’s being forced to do it rather than looking as if he’s grabbing for power.
As Matt Yglesias points out, though, this strategy is somewhat hampered by the media bias that made the “two sides” of the “stimulus debate” the people who supported it and the people who wanted it to be smaller or opposed it altogether, with the people who (correctly) thought it too small almost entirely left off the airwaves.
