I get that Joe Biden would like potential voters to be talking about something, anything other than Tara Reade. And I won’t argue against the widespread belief that the 2009 stimulus helped shorten the last big recession (although some people might, mostly on partisan grounds because deficit hawks are a nearly extinct species).

For the Biden campaign to take credit for the 2009 stimulus and use it as a talking point in 2020, though… oof.

My abiding memories of the 2009 stimulus are how it bought Bangor some new buses in 2011 (lending plausibility to a righty accusation that the Obama administration was spacing out stimulus spending to maximize political benefits rather than economic ones) and the 2010-2014 renovation of the Federal Building, which cost over half again as much as building a county courthouse from scratch. And that stupid fucking logo was prominently displayed on both.

Yes, I know, the whole point of stimulus spending is to pump money into federal contractors and other politically-connected businesses in the hopes that it’ll trickle down to the rest of the economy, but still, the 2009 stimulus left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

Not as bad a taste as voting for the personally less-annoying of two accused rapists, maybe, but if this is the closest the Biden campaign can come to a reason to vote for Joe Biden, they’d better hope that the lesser-evil voters are out in force.