Brilliant Economists??

Here is something I have pondered. Barack Obama has some young hot-shot economists as his advisers, who did yeoman's work stumping for BO during the campaign making BO's economic policies sound reasonable. Well, the scale and scope of BO's economic policies are turning out to be truly atrocious and stand in stark contrast to the reasonableness laid out over and over by Jason Furman and Austin Goolsbee. Greg Mankiw highlights this contrast today in this post. Also, throughout the campaign, Mankiw (as is his manner) vouched for these two economists as nothing short of brilliant, even though they do not share similar political affinities. So how could these brilliant economists say all this stuff that could never have been true if the policies then contemplated are the policies now on the table? Were they lying? Were they just wrong? Did Obama use them to mask his policy goals? I suspect they were naive. Most likely they actually thought that you could craft reasonable policy towards a certain goal, like healthcare reform, but were clobbered over the head by reality that nothing reasonable or sensible comes out of Washington (especially a Washington run by crypto-insane medocrities like Nancy Pelosi) once they got into office. So why don't they resign or speak out? Same with this Romer gal. She did academic work touting tax cuts over spending, but she still got out there and stumped for the $787 billion dollar porkulus dud. Something is amiss here. These economists are either not as brilliant as their colleagues claim or are somehow incredibly naive to a point that calls into question their common sense. Or they are blinded by the ambition of holding one of these plum, high-profile jobs in a presidential administration. Either way, these people need to be seriously called out onto the mat. Why is the policy we are getting nothing like what they described to us and why are they still working for an administration that has made them look like fools, willfully or otherwise?

UPDATE: Mankiw notices this happening again.