I am trying to respectfully argue that your "baseline" for comparison, in terms of economic improvement or decreasing unemployment, is wrong, and that talking heads on tv are cherry picking data to "prove" whatever talking point they are trying to push on their viewers at any given time.
People saying he is responsible for gas at $1.85 the day before he was inaugurated or persistently high unemployment and all of these jobs lost (how many were essentially illusory bubble jobs in construction - someone said something like 4% of unemployment rate is construction workers) are his fault, when he hadn't even been president for 1 minute yet.
His dilemma is no one gives him credit that it is not as bad as it could have been (second Great Depression with 25% unemployment). Plus Republicans more interested in obstructing government so economic recovery (which is already occurring) is held down till after next November, then when economic recovery becomes readily apparent to all, take credit for all the heavy lifting Obama has already done.
I believe economy has been producing 150,000 private sector jobs / month for last year, but those numbers are damped down by so many layoffs at state and local level because Republicans are blocking temporary aid to states. Plus, given growth in population, you need at least 200,000 jobs / month created to start having unemployment rate decline (some talking head on CNBC said that would probably occur next year, so unemployment rate would start down on a prolonged, gentle glidepath).
Of course, if the jobs deficit baseline is peak of economic and financial bubble in say August 2008, then off course Obama is a failure.
But careful analysis reveals a much different story... (if Obama doesn't get re-elected next November, people will try and spin story that his presidency was a failure, yet he was like George H. W. Bush, who did all of the heavy lifting (cutting spending and raising taxes) that set foundation for economic prosperity and budget surplus and jobs creation that Bill Clinton gets credit for.

People saying he is responsible for gas at $1.85 the day before he was inaugurated or persistently high unemployment and all of these jobs lost (how many were essentially illusory bubble jobs in construction - someone said something like 4% of unemployment rate is construction workers) are his fault, when he hadn't even been president for 1 minute yet.
His dilemma is no one gives him credit that it is not as bad as it could have been (second Great Depression with 25% unemployment). Plus Republicans more interested in obstructing government so economic recovery (which is already occurring) is held down till after next November, then when economic recovery becomes readily apparent to all, take credit for all the heavy lifting Obama has already done.
I believe economy has been producing 150,000 private sector jobs / month for last year, but those numbers are damped down by so many layoffs at state and local level because Republicans are blocking temporary aid to states. Plus, given growth in population, you need at least 200,000 jobs / month created to start having unemployment rate decline (some talking head on CNBC said that would probably occur next year, so unemployment rate would start down on a prolonged, gentle glidepath).
Of course, if the jobs deficit baseline is peak of economic and financial bubble in say August 2008, then off course Obama is a failure.
But careful analysis reveals a much different story... (if Obama doesn't get re-elected next November, people will try and spin story that his presidency was a failure, yet he was like George H. W. Bush, who did all of the heavy lifting (cutting spending and raising taxes) that set foundation for economic prosperity and budget surplus and jobs creation that Bill Clinton gets credit for.
But former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer wrote in an upcoming book (excerpted by GQ) that, even hours before he gave an address promoting the TARP, Bush fundamentally misunderstood what the program was all about:
Under his proposal, he said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for
them stabilized. “We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying. The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that…As it turned
out, the plan wasn’t to buy low and sell high. In some cases, in fact, Secretary Paulson wanted to pay more than the securities were likely worth in order to put more money into the markets as soon as possible. [...]
In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was
going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that
his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration. “Why did I sign on to this
proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.
The proposal that Bush offered that night would ultimately be rejected by the House of Representatives, with a slightly modified bill passing one week later. And it should come as no surprise that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ultimately abandoned the idea to buy toxic assets entirely, instead opting for bank recapitalization, devoid of meaningful strings for the banks. As Latimer reported it, “the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know [which course of action he favored], changed his mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...g+high&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
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