RAHM EMANUEL'S UTTER INABILITY TO GRASP THE ZEITGEIST

I confess I haven't read ryan Lizza's New Yorker article on the fiscal crisis -- I've read only the excerpts that are showing up in blog posts by Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, and Brad DeLong. At first I was prepared to see Larry Summers as the biggest villain of the piece because he chose not to present Christina Romer's (undoubtedly accurate) trillion-dollar-plus estimate for how much stimulus was needed:

The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn't require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer's analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer’s $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure." At the meeting, according to one participant, "there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars."

But then I see this:

Emanuel made the final call: six hundred and seventy-five to seven hundred and seventy-five billion dollars, with the understanding that, as the bill made its way through Congress, it was more likely to grow than to shrink.

It was more likely to what?

Of course, what happened is that there was an $825 billion bill in the House and we wound up with a $787 billion bill -- barely more than Emanuel's upper limit -- of which only about $600 billion was genuine stimulus.

Where the hell did Emanuel get the idea that the bill would grow in Congress? Did he have no bloody idea what modern Republicans are like (utterly intransigent) and what modern Democrats are like (unwilling to take their own side in an argument)? Is this the great genius driving the Obama bus -- a guy who thought everything would just be absurdly easy because of Obama's (and his own) irresistible brilliance and wonderfulness?

Give him the hook.