Newly elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown has a unflattering cameo in yesterday’s New York Times article by David Leonhardt on the effects of last year’s federal stimulus package:

The logical thing to do would be to examine what worked and what didn’t in last year’s bill.

But that’s not what is happening. Instead, the debate is largely disconnected from the huge stimulus experiment we just ran. Why? As Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the newest member of Congress, said, in a nice summary of the misperceptions, the stimulus might have saved some jobs, but it “didn’t create one new job.”

But Brown’s office again told the Boston Globe yesterday that the stimulus has been a bust for Massachusetts:

“No amount of political spin can change the fact that we have lost jobs every month since the stimulus passed,” said Brown spokesman Colin Reed. “Only in the alternative universe that is Beacon Hill would they consider that a success.”

One reason for the differing perception is that Brown is apparently looking at overall job creation, while the White House (and Gov. Patrick) are saying that the stimulus has been successful at partially offsetting continued job losses in the private sector. As Kevin Drum proposed on his blog, “the stimulus is getting us there a lot faster than we would have gotten there otherwise.”

Barack Obama’s political organization has also made its case by releasing the following chart, which shows continued job losses for all but one month in Obama’s presidency but at a much slower rate: