DeLong Smackdown Watch: The Deficit Hawks of Obama's OMB

A number of messages have arrived by email, carrier pigeon, anonymous phone call, and other means protesting that my Battered but Not and Beaten talk is unfair to the deficit hawks of Obama's OMB. They claim that the deficits hawks' position was more nuanced than I allow, and that it was:

Enacting temporary stimulus that was fully paid for over ten years was a better economic policy than an unpaid-for stimulus: you don't risk any adverse short-term effects on production from an erosion of confidence in the long-run fiscal stability of the government, and you don't make our long-term deficit problems worse.

Proposing a temporary stimulus that was fully paid for over ten years was a better political strategy than an unpaid-for stimulus: the key blockers of further stimulus were the center block of the Senate, who wanted to see a path not just to recovery but to solving the long-run deficit problem as well. Propose a short-term stimulus that makes the long-term deficit problem worse and you can kiss their votes and thus any hopes of passage of a bill goodbye.

Given that the Congress was unwilling to enact short-term fiscal stimulus on anywhere near the magnitude needed to deal with the recession, the only strategy that had any chance of success at all was to pivot to long-term--not short-term, long-term--deficit reduction and hope that the Confidence Fairy would in fact show up.