Andrea’s appearance on Morning Joe today was a perfect illustration of the phenomenon.  Making the case for the Obama stimulus plan, Mitchell oscillated between citing the arguments of others and speaking in her own voice.  Along the way, she did make one demonstrably incorrect assertion, that “very few economists, right, left or center, would disagree that money needs to be poured in.”

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Barack Obama has got to know that Keynesian economics isn’t just: spend money.  It’s: target that money.

ANDREA MITCHELL: But you’ve got some really smart people as well–Larry Summers and others, we’ve been talking about that this morning–who believe that something has to be done, and that while some of the money will not get where it’s supposed to go, that that is not the overriding fact, that money’s going to get into the economy.

A bit later . . .

SCARBOROUGH: But Andrea, we were talking about before, Barack Obama keeps saying we need to change, the policies of the last eight years have been failed policies.  Well sure they have.  It’s been deficit spending year after year. The Bush people stimulated the economy in every way they could stimulate the economy.  It gives us big debts, and now we’re continuing to go in that direction.

This time, Mitchell cited the big guy himself. But her own voice began to creep in.

MITCHELL: I think what Obama said Thursday night was: stimulus means pouring money in.  You have to deficit spend to get the economy going.  That’s the definition.

SCARBOROUGH: We’ve been doing that for eight years!

MITCHELL: But in a different point in the cycle. The difference is that now we are in a recession, and that now  –

At that point, Mitchell hesitated, seemingly aware that she was letting her Obama-advocate side show a bit too much.  So she backed off, and again cited others to make her case.

MITCHELL: — according to Republican and Democratic economists–Martin Feldstein would disagree with the way and the pace with which it’s being spent–but very few economists, right, left or center, would disagree that money needs to be poured in. That it has to be deficit spending.”

Really?  Let’s start with the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial on the matter was extensively cited on Morning Joe today.  And how about those 250 economists who signed the Cato Institute ad, explicitly taking exception to the president’s claim that “there is no disagreement that we need action by your government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy”?

A bit later, Joe put things in earthy terms.  when Pat Buchanan, picking up on Joe’s argument, confronted Andrea, it seemed to provoke her again into speaking for herself on behalf of the president’s plan.

SCARBOROUGH: We’re screwed. We really are. No seriously. Let me say that one more time, Pat. We as a country are screwed because of the debts we have piled up.

PAT BUCHANAN: And we’re piling up more.  And this is the point, Andrea.  Look: if tax cuts and easy money and big spending got us into the mess, why are tax cuts and bigger spending and easier money going to get us out?

MITCHELL: Because of the kind of mess we’re in right now. There’s going to have to be a time when they figure out how to withdraw the money. And how to do it at a time when it is politically viable, but more importantly, economically –

BUCHANAN: Do you believe they’ll pull it all out?

MITCHELL: I don’t. And that’s the thing that I think we have to worry about. But I think right now, the president [back to citing others] his argument, and the argument of people on, you know, in the Republican party as well. I mean, John McCain isn’t arguing we shouldn’t be spending.  He’s just arguing that it should be on the tax cut side and it should be half as big.

Tax cuts are “spending”? Only if you believe Americans’ wealth belongs to the government.