Joshua Green: >Why the Stimulus Ran Out of Steam: The faltering recovery and the credibility this has cost the the White House will probably lose the Democrats one or both houses of Congress, making the insufficiency of the stimulus easily the most consequential error for an administration that has done a lot right. To appreciate how it happened, it's necessary to understand the twin imperatives that dominate White House thinking.... >Barack Obama's [administration has a] devotion to experts and empirical data, a reaction against the ideology-driven Presidency of George W. Bush. The second is a Washington political savvy... that imagines itself the antithesis of... Arkansas provincialism.... [M]ore often than not these traits have combined to impressive effect... health care.... >When Obama's top advisers gathered in Chicago to devise an economic strategy just after the presidential election they largely agreed about what to do. Aggressive monetary and fiscal expansion had been the standard response to economic setbacks from the Great Depression onward. The question was, how aggressive should they be?... Romer, an expert on the Great Depression, modeled the effects of stimulus packages of $600 billion, $800 billion, and $1.2 trillion, and concluded that the largest one would be necessary to fill the expected output gap over 2009 and 2010. Economists outside the White House agreed. But Romer's recommendation, deemed politically unfeasible, never got a proper hearing.... [T]he stimulus has worked -- but not well enough to produce an adequate recovery. >This came as no surprise. Earlier this year, the White House considered calling for reinforcements. But political caution again took precedence, and any further stimulus initiative was deemed unfeasible.... The president kept quiet.... >That approach clearly hasn't worked, economically or politically.... [C]aution has failed to translate into more effective politics, leaving the president in the awkward position of having to campaign for puny bills plainly inadequate to the larger problem.... >The White House insists that it could not have gotten a larger stimulus through Congress.... But by twice neglecting to try, it has staked its fortunes on a policy that has visibly fallen short on the issue of greatest concern, the economy. Because of the divide between the experts and the strategists, nothing is happening. Given the weak state of the economy, the White House cannot claim that the stimulus it settled for has sufficed. Unwilling to call for another one, it is left to look on silently and helplessly.