Barack Obama's "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"

Guess what? The $787 billion porkulus bill wasn't meant to stimulate the economy after all.

According to ABC News:

Turns out the $787 billion "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" (AARA) was not designed for full economic recovery, but rather to "stabilize" the downturn. That's the word from White House officials today, who held off-camera briefings with reporters on how the AARA is working so far.

"This legislation was designed to cushion the downturn," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. "That's why we have always talked about this as one function of economic recovery."

When pressed about the change in terminology, Gibbs said he was not trying to temper expectations after the fact. "I can probably find 15 or 20 occasions when I said this in the lead up," Gibbs said, explaining that he had always defined the AARA as part of a "multi-legged stool."

Senior Economic Adviser Jared Bernstein said that the economy is improving -- or at least getting "less bad." And he said, that's a good thing.

"It's always challenging to explain that things getting less bad is actually a necessary path on the way to them being good, but that's the truth," Bernstein said. "The trends have to go recession, stabilization, recovery. Negative, less negative, positive."

Karl Rove has something to say about this.

So what's a president to do when the promises he made about his economic stimulus program fail to materialize? If you're Barack Obama, you redefine your goals and act as if America won't remember what you said originally. That's a neat trick if you can get away with it, but Mr. Obama won't. His words are a matter of public record and he will be held to them.

When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration promised, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, "You'll see the effects begin almost immediately." Now it's clear that those promised jobs and growth haven't materialized.

So Mr. Obama is attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post that his stimulus "was, from the start, a two-year program." That is misleading. Mr. Obama never said if his stimulus were passed things might still get significantly worse in the following year.