Being in charge during a recession is no fun. If you turn it around, great, but in the meantime you're blamed for the mess you inherited. It doesn't matter if you had nothing to do with it -- even John Corzine would probably have been re-elected had New Jersey's economy been good, since a governor is most popular when his coffers are flush.
The Republican party line is that the stimulus has been a failure, an unnecessary waste of money, a huge debt left to our children and grandchildren. It's great line when you don't have to live by it. You can lie all you want about "coulda, woulda". Reality doesn't intrude on your alternative-world scenarios.
But what really would have happened had the Republicans won the last election? Scary, yes, but it's as scary for them as for us....
Simple Keynsian economics dictates how to deal with recessions and, yes, depressions. ("Great Recession" is a lousy euphemism. Recession is the downslope; depression is when it stays down rather than have a quick recovery.) Nothing has contradicted it lately; the anti-Keynes Chicago School is in retreat after the failure of the deregulatory economy of the last decade.
When the economy slows down, there's lots of spare capacity in the economy. People aren't working, and resources aren't being used up. It's aggregate demand, a/k/a money, that's in short supply. And the fix is easy: Increase the money supply. Since demand is slow, lowering interest rates won't do it; this requires deficit spending. That can be a mix of lower taxes and higher spending, but it requires deficits. The deficit is the medicine.
When the government runs a deficit, it has to "borrow" the money. This is done by the treasury in the form of auctions. Typically they'll auction off $10k "bills" with a given maturity. When there's a lot of demand and the government needs to borrow a lot, then the interest rate will rise. When there's low demand, then the interest rate will be low. This is where the Federal Reserve comes in. Their job is to try to control the money supply to prevent inflation without causing recessions. And they have a unique tool at their disposal. They can purchase the debt, literally creating the money out of thin air. This is called monetizing the debt. The money still counts towards the aggregate national debt, but it's not really owed to anyone; the Fed has taken care of it.
The Fed sets target interest rates and uses that as a guide for its participation in the T-bill auctions. If it thinks interest rates are too high, meaning that insufficient demand for the debt (and thus a higher price needed to get borrowers to show up), then it buys more federal debt, raising the price of bills and thus lowering the effective interest rate. If it thinks rates are too low, it sits out the auction, or buys less.
Of course the bond auction only occurs because the government is running a deficit. Thus money can't be created unless there is debt to monetize. A balanced budget feeds the depression, not growth. You'd end up with a Hoover-style depression. U3 unemployment rates would easily hit 15%, by Republican estimates. That would be a disaster for the party in power, as Hoover experienced.
Many Republicans know this. Some are too deep into the reality-distortion field to accept it, but not enough to sustain a filibuster. But they don't have to admit that they know it. Instead, they preach Hooverism and let Obama and the Democrats take stimulative action. They know what needs to be done, yet they get political points from their base by attacking it. The hypocrisy is breathtaking but totally predictable.
Had the Republicans won the last election, they would have had to chart one of two economic courses. One, the ones they preach, would have been to cut taxes, severely clamp down on spending to try to balance the budget, throw millions of people out of work, and pray for the magic money faerie to reward them. This would work for part of their base: The truly wealthy would be happy with the increased supply and lower price of servants. But the vote-rich uneducated working-class (mostly religious) part of their base would suffer too much and would be hard to placate.
The other course would be to take stimulative action, as the Democrats did, and hope that the economic success overcomes the political damage. Dick Nixon took this course, famously declaring himself to be a Keynsian once it really mattered. But the while Nixon was a master of the social wedge issues, his economics were (by today's post-Reagan/Bush standards) downright liberal. His conversion to Keynsianism did not hurt him politically, but it was a different party in those days. Hoover's legacy was still remembered.
Deficits in time of prosperity are a different story. There's not a lot of slack in the economy, so deficit spending requires borrowing that either raises interest rates (thus slowing the economy) or increases the money supply more rapidly than the output of the economy. That creates inflation. Scott Brown ran by calling for "Kennedy-style" tax cuts. In 1961, Kennedy called for tax cuts (rates were much higher then than now), but they didn't occur until after his assassination. President Johnson then didn't want to raise taxes to cover the cost of the Vietnam War, so his Fed inflated the currency instead. So like any medicine, deficit spending is helpful when taken as prescribed, harmful at other times.
It's important for us to stress the fundamental dishonesty of the Republicans. But we should know how happy they are to not be ruling during a recession or depression, because if they had kept Bush's economy, they would be toast. And the rest of the country might well have been collateral damage.