Sorry, but there's been quite a lot more of the opposite of that going on over the last four years.
The same people who insist that Bush should not be blamed for a terrorist attack that occurred 10 months after he took office routinely blame Obama for job losses that occurred as part of a steep downward slope that was underway months before he took office.
True. I was smacking down MomentofSanity in particular, not trying to make a larger point. In reality, Presidents get credit and blame for whatever happens on their watch, even though for most of it they have little or no control.
We should all realize that the crash and the slow death spiral of a recovery are not the exclusive result of any one policy, party, or individual. I also think our country has persistent underlying structural issues which prevent any party or President from causing or enjoying the roaring recoveries to which we're accustomed. 60% of our economy is consumer spending and roughly two thirds of that is foreign-manufactured goods. Artificially boosting demand won't work because much of that money goes right out of our economy, returning only in loans or in buying out American companies and property. Cutting taxes on job providers won't work because increasingly, more jobs can be outsourced out of the country and it will remain much more profitable to create new jobs out of the country, for labor costs, health care costs, regulatory restrictions, and taxes. Frankly I don't see any real recovery until we fix this, and I don't see any politically palatable and even marginally painless way to fix this. But until we figure out how to consume less than we create, I suspect we'll continue to argue over a few percentage points either way. It won't be Romney's 4% unemployment versus Obama's 8% unemployment, it will be Romney's 8.2% unemployment versus Obama's 8.4% unemployment. (Or if you prefer, vice versa; since we can never examine both alternatives enacted and there are myriad factors, it can be argued either way.
EDIT: One minor correction: 9/11 was eight months into Bush's term, not ten. I'll accept your point though; Bush ran at least in small part against the wall Clinton elected between CIA and FBI to protect his illegal donors, then in eight months did fuck-all to fix it. Had he the courage of his campaign issue, 9/11 might well have been stopped. As it happened, only political correctness, bumbling government inaction, and some bad luck prevented us from breaking the cells prior to the attack.
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