The measures that [President Obama]‘s taken don’t seem to me to be the measures that would be needed to an economy that’s in a serious recession… In a situation like this, you don’t spend more money, you don’t spend historic amounts of money, you reduce the amount of money that you’re spending. you reduce government spending… pretty much across the board make major reductions, get your expenses down.

This is what was tried, with disastrous results, by President Herbert Hoover’s administration.

Smith notes that Giuliani thinks his “stance on the stimulus would likely be a campaign issue” if he made a comeback and ran for governor of New York. This seems wrongheaded after Republican congressional candidate Jim Tedisco blew a 20-point lead running an anti-stimulus campaign against Democrat Scott Murphy, in a district that had been safely Republican until 2006.