We’ve seen several retrospectives of the Administration’s actions to deal with the economic crisis in 2009-2010, and Ryan Lizza has a new one in the New Yorker. His recounting of the memos and exchanges between Larry Summers and Obama add to the view of Summers inducing Obama to pull his punches for political reasons, ensuring the stimulus would be too small.

I said in my initial story on the new refi plan for Fannie and Freddie-backed homes that it’s not a housing plan, but a stimulus plan. Really important to keep that in mind. The housing market is depressed because of $700 billion in negative equity. This plan wouldn’t touch dollar 1 of that. It’ll put some more money in people’s pockets if they meet certain guidelines.

Jonathan Chait is a typical Beltway-minded Very Serious Thinker, which means that in his crafting of an apologia for yet another cave-in by Obama to corporate America’s well-heeled (and campaign-contributing) titans, he likes to a) assume that Obama’s most prominent lefty critics have no idea how politics works in America when in fact they understand it better than he ever will, and b) play fast and loose with the truth.

I naively thought Obama’s offering to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would put an end to the “liberals are being unfair to Obama” genre, but Jonathan Chait (heh-indeeded by John Cole) published another one in the New York Times magazine today.

It’s full of problems, but I want to focus on this one — because it’s so obviously wrong.

Jared Bernstein asks a provocative question: “Have we, as a nation, lost the ability to self-correct?”

I think it’s worth asking this question. Because look at the facts. We had a stimulus package and even a follow-on bill to make sure that education would not suffer during the recession, and that teachers wouldn’t get laid off in mass numbers. We knew, then, that pulling this funding would cause a total sink on education, a 90/10 issue on which everyone agrees – you cannot have a 21st-century powerful nation without a strong base in education. But we didn’t keep up the funding, and as a result,

Lots of attention is being paid to the shuttering of Solyndra, a solar company that received federal loans from the Energy Department in the Recovery Act, and took part in a visit by the President last year.

The CBO is up with a report today showing that the stimulus is responsible for 2.9 million jobs – a show of strength for the $787 billion program.

Instead of making payroll tax fairness a fixture of the Democratic brand, instead of wrapping that into a critique about the inequality that is at the heart of what America needs to fix in order to have sustainable finances again, Democrats chase these little moments to “prove” Republican hypocrisy – and in turn confuse everyone as to what it means to be a Democrat.

Romney is hinting that the economy — the fire — needed not just more stimulus, but longer-lasting stimulus. Instead of pouring on a little gasoline to kick start the fire, we’d needed a slow-burning log that would provide fuel for a longer period.

As ever the Republican brand of bipartisanship is to threaten to burn down the town if the Democrats don’t hand over the matches.