Absolutely its an example of an Obama Eff-up. Remember the "stimulus package"? He has had a year of full control doing everything he said would fix these issues and they are not only not fixed, but worse than what he said they would be if he didn't "fix" them. How is that hard to grasp exactly?
He can not blame "current" problems on Bush, not anymore. Current is him baby, he's pushed through so much policy to fix the issues, he can't let the buck stop at Bush anymore. Ironically, if he took responsibility for anything he has done, his approval numbers might not be falling as fast as they are. He has taken way too much action to allow the fault to fall on someone else.
Oh and yes, bad prediction does mean bad policy especially when said policy is based upon said faulty predictions. Is it really that complicated?
Okay, first of all, a minor clarification: I and others have been careful to use phrases like "problems Obama inherited," precisely because we're not blaming Bush specifically. The economic crisis was caused by many factors, most of which had very little to do with Dubbya. The point is not "Hey, blame the Republicans!" but rather that, when first Obama took office, the economy was in a tailspin (both on Wall Street and Main Street), and that it only makes sense to judge the success of his economic policies with that in mind.
Your argument is essentially (A) Obama had a year of doing whatever we wanted, and (B) he promised all these policies would fix the economy if they passed, therefore (C) the fact that we're still having economic problems (high unemployment & underemployment) means these were bad policies. I disagree with A & B, and even if A & B were true I'd disagree with conclusion C.
A: Obama has not exactly been in "full control" to implement whatever policies he's wanted. You know that. For all major policies he's had to rely on Congressional leadership (separation of powers is a bitch). Tons of legislation has stalled in a divided Senate. In the end, we're only talking about a single big piece of legislation (the Stimulus Package), plus a few smaller things like the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act. Then of course there's TARP, which the Executive Branch did have a lot of control over, but then again TARP has been TREMENDOUSLY successful by every possible metric, so I don't think you're objecting to that.
My point is that it's disingenuous to use phrases like "full control" and "he's pushed through so much policy", when in fact he's had to fight for a couple legislative victories. Your language makes it seem like it was within Obama's power to fully solve the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, when the reality is far from that.
B: Obama never promised he's policies would fix our economic woes. I challenge you to find a single example of him using the word "fix" to describe the effect of the Stimulus package on any economic indicator (maybe you'll prove me wrong, I don't know). His argument was and still is that these policies would HELP. And they have. 3Q GDP growth was 2.9 percent versus a consensus forecast of 0.7 percent, and 4Q growth is expected to beat forecasts by >2 percent. A wide range of independent analysts agree that the stimulus package contributed substantially to this growth in GDP. The stock market bounced way back; the Dow has risen >4,000 points since it's lowest point this year (or at least it was that high before this week
🙂)
Yes, the employment situation is still quite bad. But that is ALWAYS the case in every economic downturn this country has ever faced: employment lags behind other economic indicators in the recovery. The Obama Administration has been saying this from the beginning.
When Obama, or Romer, or whoever it was, projected what the unemployment situation would be with and without the stimulus, they weren't
promising that the percentage of unemployed adults would be X if the bill passed. They weren't promising that the unemployment problem would go away. The promise was that the bill would create jobs, and
lessen the unemployment problem.
This relates to why I disagree with C: it only makes sense to grade a President's policies based on their outcome relative to what would have happened if he did something else, or did nothing at all. Grading those policies instead based on unrealistically rosy predictions, predictions made at a time when no one knew exactly how bad a shape the economy were in, is not useful.
Doing so makes as little sense as praising a President in this situation: there's a natural disaster; the President predicts that 10,000 people will die despite relief efforts; it turns out that only 8,000 people die; but ample evidence surfaces that the rescue effort was poorly coordinated, aid failed to reach its destination the President was slow to respond and didn't authorize enough aid... you get the point. Should the President be praised or criticized in that situation? Well, he met his predictions!
My point is: there's a lot of data and analysis out there on the impact the stimulus has had on job growth and the GDP. Some of it's positive. Some of it's negative. The truth is that the impact on job growth has been fairly small so far, and that's partially due to the bill's biggest weakness: a lot of the money has not been given out yet. Anyway, if you want to argue about the benefits of the Obama economic agenda, look up the data for how individual sectors have been effected by the stimulus. To simply sit there and say, "But he promised we'd have only 8 percent unemployment!" is intellectually lazy, and you know that.
Finally, you say the bad predictions are evidence of bad policy because the policy was based on the prediction. Not really. The stimulus was NOT designed based on the prediction that unemployment would be 8%. It was designed based on the idea that lots of people would lose jobs (particularly in publicly funded sectors like education), and so we need to extend unemployment benefits and devote extra funds to public schools so that teachers don't lose their jobs. If anything, the fact that the Obama administration underestimated how high unemployment would get proves that the stimulus should have been BIGGER, with more spending. It doesn't support what (I expect) you believe, which is that the stimulus spending was a waste.
