Success Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia swings a broadsword here, not a scalpel: “monstrous,” “stumbled,” “Waterloo.” The sentence is built to make policy feel like fate. By yoking a technocratic object (a stimulus package) to a mythic historical defeat, she turns fiscal debate into a character test and, more pointedly, a legitimacy test. Obama isn’t just being evaluated; he’s being framed as a leader whose grand narrative could collapse in one overreaching campaign.

The intent is polemical and prophylactic. She’s planting a marker early in the presidency: whatever else happens - wars, courts, culture - the scoreboard will be the economy, and the opening move will be remembered as either decisive or disastrous. That’s a way of denying the administration the comforting sprawl of “complexity.” If you accept her frame, you also accept a brutal simplicity: one package, one verdict.

Subtext: distrust of managerial liberalism and of the aesthetic of competence that surrounded Obama in 2008-09. “Stumbled out of the gate” punctures the aura of deliberation; it implies panic, haste, and a rookie’s misstep, not a calculated Keynesian intervention. “Within the U.S.” is a quiet tell, too - she’s separating domestic judgment from global iconography, warning that admiration abroad won’t pay rent at home.

Context matters: this is crisis-era rhetoric, written when the stimulus was both an emergency tool and a symbolic wager about the size and role of government after the financial crash. Paglia’s genius is making that wager feel narratively irreversible, which is exactly how you win attention in a moment when attention is the scarcest currency.