Megan McArdle writes...

...with a libertarian bent for the Atlantic. For all the hand-wringing lately about Obama's approval numbers, I found her blog post today to be refreshingly sensible, particularly this paragraph:

In the world I live in, the administration got as much stimulus as it was going to get, against a population that was tepid and a bunch of senators who were timid. He was limited on housing relief by homeowners and renters who weren't in trouble, and resented giving their money to people who had bought too much house. He in fact scored some major legislative victories, like health care, against fierce headwinds. The only place you could argue that he had more room was on a more bank-punitive bailout, and subsequent financial reform packages--but in those cases, the technocrats at Treasury had reasonable fears that this would have caused credit markets to contract even more severely, with the resulting economic decline making Democratic poll numbers even worse.