Could Anyone Have Fixed The Economy?

Over the weekend, Ezra Klein argued, at length, that Obama handled the economic crisis about as well as possible. Drum summarizes:

Despite everything, Team Obama actually did pretty well. Maybe 70-80% as well as anyone could have done. Housing was their single biggest area of failure, but even there, taxpayer and congressional resistance to bailing out "reckless" borrowers constrained them more than critics usually admit. Our failure to adequately address the Great Recession wasn't really rooted in the Obama administration, it was rooted in the fact that virtually no one, faced with an economic crisis, ever has the guts to truly unleash the proper amount of firepower. It's a very human problem, but for now anyway, humans are all we have. So a human response was what we got.

Chait's counterfactual:

But what if we had a Republican president? Perhaps a President McCain might have designed a less sweeping and less effective stimulus than President Obama did. But Republicans would have gone along — after all, they did under Bush, and this time the justification was far stronger. It’s also likely that Democrats would have gone along, because they have shown themselves to be happy to support stimulus under Republican presidents. It also seems likely that, as the crisis deepened, President McCain would have fought for more stimulus measures, and these measures would not have been dead on arrival because there would not have been a right-wing backlash against the first one.