I don’t mind being attacked for my views. After all, I try to be thought-provoking, bring a new perspective to issues, and offer creative ideas that might not be popular. What I do find strange is being attacked in the New York Time by Jonathan Chait for what I consider a completely noncontroversial statement: in retrospect, Obama should have spent more of his first two years focusing on increasing employment. From Chait op-ed:

Perhaps the oddest feature of the liberal indictment of Obama is its conclusion that Obama should have focused all his political capital on economic recovery. “He could likely have passed many small follow-up stimulative laws in 2009,” Jon Walker of the popular blog Firedoglake wrote last month. “Instead, he pivoted away from the economic crisis because he wrongly ignored those who warned the crisis was going to get worse.”

It’s worth recalling that several weeks before Obama proposed an $800 billion stimulus, House Democrats had floated a $500 billion stimulus. (Oddly, this never resulted in liberals portraying Nancy Pelosi as a congenitally timid right-wing enabler.) At the time, Obama’s $800 billion stimulus was seen by Congress, pundits and business leaders — that is to say, just about everybody who mattered — as mind-bogglingly large. News reports invariably described it as “huge,” “massive” or other terms suggesting it was unrealistically large, even kind of pornographic. The favored cliché used to describe the reaction in Congress was “sticker shock.”

Blue Texan already did a great job showing that plenty of people “who mattered” thought the stimulus bill was too small, so I will not repeat his points but talk simply about my commonplace idea that Chait calls odd.

This massive jobs crisis is devastating for our economy, our long term productivity and the lives of millions of Americans. Most agree this is a terrible crisis, and most Keynesians believe it could be mitigated with government spending. That is why I find beyond perplexing that anyone would call it “odd” to claim that with perfect hindsight Obama should have focused more on job creation given that during his tenure unemployment climbed to over 9% and has remains basically stuck there for two years.

The idea that knowing what we know now, Obama should have spent much more of his political capital on this ongoing jobs crisis is not some wacky fringe idea. His own former economic adviser Christina Romer has repeatedly said that if they knew things were going to be this bad they would have tried to do more.

It is also what the American people wanted all along. Throughout Obama’s first two years, the electorate wanted Obama focus on the economy/jobs. Poll after poll after poll throughout the first year found that voters thought the economy should be his top priority; yet assuming the economy would start recovering soon, Obama choose to spend most of that year focused on health care reform.

Chait is basically making the ridiculous claim that even if a time traveler went back to tell Obama how bad the jobs crisis would be, Obama still shouldn’t have spent more of his political capital on increasing unemployment. The logical knots some Obama defenders are tying themselves into to avoid just admitting their leader made a major mistake is truly mind-boggling.