ROBERT SAMUELSON: The Squandered Stimulus: “The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact. It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes. As a result, much of the stimulus’s potential benefit has been squandered. . . . Here, as elsewhere, there’s a gap between Obama’s high-minded rhetoric and his performance. In February, Obama denounced ‘politics as usual’ in constructing the stimulus. But that’s what we got, and Obama likes the result.”