How well is that stimulus working?

President Obama (or his speech writer) has a column in the Washington Post defending his economic policies. He uses one of his favorite rhetorical devices:

They favor an incremental approach or believe that doing nothing is somehow an answer. But that is exactly the thinking that led us to this predicament.

His critics are not impressed. Here is Stephen Spruiell on The Corner

We should not allow Obama to take credit pre-emptively for any future recovery when there is such a strong case to be made that his policies created a level of uncertainty that prevented the recovery from starting sooner.

Keith Hennessey does an almost sentence-by-sentence critique:

This did not have to be a two-year program. Congress could have front-loaded the stimulus had they instead given the cash directly to the American people, as they did on a bipartisan basis in early 2008. We would have saved much of it, paying off our mortgages, student loans, and credit cards (which would not be a bad thing). We would have spent the rest much more quickly than the federal and state government bureaucracies now stumbling through their usual corrupt, slow and inefficient processes. Instead the President handed the money and program design over to a Congress of his own party, who saw it as a big honey pot rather than as an exercise in macroeconomic fiscal policy. The President’s primary macroeconomic policy mistake was allowing Congress to pervert a rapid Keynesian stimulus into a slow-spending interest-based binge.

Finally, Ed Morrissey at hotair.com:

Note too that Obama has quietly dropped the promise to “save or create at least 3 million jobs by the end of 2010,” as Romer’s support of Porkulus claimed. Nowhere in this essay does Obama put a number on jobs. Suddenly, Porkulus has stopped being a jobs project — the entire basis on which Obama pushed Congress to pass it — and has become instead a foundational, long-term rebuilding of the American economy.