Derek Thompson's takeaway from last night was that the GOP has "won the broader battle over stimulus":
Treasury yields are still historically low. It will never be cheaper to borrow money to pay for mandatory future expenses to infrastructure. But rather than make the case for short-term stimulus — as the president himself did in his failed American Jobs Act — the emphasis has shifted to fiscal responsibility and the contrast between Obama's plan to raise taxes and slow growth in government and Romney's plan to dramatically cut taxes and cut deeply into future discretionary spending.
Yglesias picks up on this too. Chait, meanwhile, places Obama's $787 billion stimulus package in historical context:
The domestic reforms embedded in the stimulus alone — the scope of which is described in Michael Grunwald’s book The New New Deal — did more to reshape the face of government in areas like education and energy than Clinton managed in eight years…. It is true that, as stimulus, Obama’s economic recovery bill was not nearly large enough to restore full employment. But for some perspective on its scale, recall that Clinton (facing a sluggish recovery from a far milder recession) proposed a $19.5 billion stimulus as his first major legislative measure, negotiated it down to $15.4 billion, and finally saw the whole thing collapse. In that light, Obama’s $787 billion bill looks like a fairly impressive political achievement.
The Dish 