Liberals are beside themselves trying to figure out how Barack Obama can ‘reclaim control of the agenda.’ Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh has an interesting idea — to admit to the American people that the package will waste a lot of money, and say it’s essential anyway:

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. 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. 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. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

There are several problems with this approach:

1. As Obama probably recognizes, this plan isn’t really going to work.  The economy is not going to get much better and Americans are unlikely to look back in 2 or 4 years and say ‘thank goodness we cut Barack Obama some slack and accepted a few hundred billion in wasteful spending.’  Rather, his admission of waste will make it easier to portray a bad bill as a bad bill.
2. The admission that any bill of this size naturally has a lot of waste will hurt even more when the debate begins over TARP II (next week), as well as over health care reform, a transportation reauthorization, the FY09 omnibus bill, and other spending packages. Conceding the problems with this bill is an indictment of those as well.

Via Glenn