Say all you want about how Obama inherited this recession; he wants credit for the recovery. So let's give him the recovery. Look at how it compares to all the other postwar recession recoveries. To us ignorant, unwashed hillbillies, it sure looks like Obama's "recovery" is going nowhere slowly.He's reacting to the Establishment spin, which once again seeks to lay off a failure of The Best And The Brightest on the false consciousness or susceptibility to influence or just plain stupidity of the electorate.
Out of eleven recession recoveries, Obama's is the only one that did not go above its pre-recession GDP peak by the third quarter of recovery. It is still not there even by the fifth quarter. It is one of only two in which there were fewer jobs fifteen months into the recovery than at the beginning of it. Yes, the hole was slightly deeper this time, but there is little evidence that we are even crawling out of it.
I think I know what some of you might say: Obama is only on the bottom of those charts because he started out in the deepest hole. Sorry, but even the rate of improvement in this recovery is historically anemic. The growth in GDP is the third-slowest of the eleven postwar recessions, and the growth in jobs is the second-slowest.
Because the trigger for this recession is a financial reset, the path of recovery might be different. The very ambition of the Obama Administration, by changing a lot of laws at a same time that tax rate cuts were about to expire, might have compounded the uncertainty. You'd think that's the kind of thing a professor with a lectern could say.
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