Obama "stimulus czar" leaving because his advocacy for more stimulus was going nowhere

Jared Bernstein meets with progressive bloggers in February 2010

I'm just calling him a czar to give Glenn Beck an aneurism, Jared Bernstein really is Joe Biden's economic adviser and in charge of the stimulus for the White House.  According to Jonathan Weisman at the WSJ, Bernstein is leaving because his advocacy for more stimulus monies is going nowhere with the Republican House.  In fact, it was going nowhere from day one, when the President advocated for, and got, a much smaller stimulus than was needed to pull the nation out of its economic funk.

Who can forget the infamous meeting Rahm had with Olympia Snowe when she demanded the proposed stimulus, already too small, be cut another $100 billion.  As Joe wrote a year ago:

Washington Post:

When it came time for the economic stimulus plan, Emanuel -- arguing that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste" -- was the White House's point man in the Senate. There, too, he valued the plausible over the perfect.

Snowe said he was "responsive" to her interest in removing $100 billion in spending from the stimulus bill. "He understood it operationally and legislatively, what needed to be accomplished, and was very straightforward," she said.

At the time, the President's approval rating was soaring and the economy was on the brink of collapse. Everyone was talking about another Great Depression, and economist were saying we needed $2 trillion in stimulus spending. The President's own chair of his Council of Economic Advisers said we needed $1.2 trillion. So Emanuel's first instinct was to compromise and go for less (less than what was needed to avert a Depression and keep unemployment far below 10%). If he were the hard-ass we'd all been led to believe he was, Emanuel would have sent Obama to Maine to campaign for the strongest bill possible, in order to get Snowe's and Collin's votes. That's what a real tough Chief of Staff would have done, instead of caving as quickly as possible on the medicine needed to save the country from economic collapse. Emanuel made Obama look weak right off the bat -- and the Republicans saw it immediately.

Interestingly, Bernstein is the man I met with last year, with a small group of bloggers at the White House, to talk stimulus.  And he's the one who was apparently not very happy when I questioned him about the White House's failure to push for a bigger initial, and then second, stimulus, and their failure to sufficiently defend the stimulus they got against GOP attacks claiming it didn't do anything.  It did do something, just not enough because it wasn't big enough, and everyone should have known it at the time.  Berstein also proceeded to blame the Netroots for the White House's failure to counter the GOP PR attack on the stimulus.

So it's somewhat ironic that Bernstein is leaving because his advocacy for more stimulus is going nowhere.  Those of us who were his allies sure weren't treated as such.