The Obama Haters Have It Wrong

I recently received a message in my email: "The stunning decline of Barack Obama: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown." My immediate reaction was: how can reasonably intelligent people have it so wrong? And I quickly worked out the answers to why each of the 10 enumerated reasons had the world backwards.

1.) The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people. The charge made is a "let them eat cake" assertion which is based on irrelevant incidents like Michelle Obama's trip to Spain. The accurate facts are very different. Presidents do not/ cannot create jobs, but they can seek to establish the conditions which, over some reasonable period of time, can drive the large economy to renewed job growth. The conditions that existed when Obama took office inevitably and immediately put him, and his administration, in a deep hole. He had to stimulate. To do that he had to dig the debt hole even deeper. And he and the whole country had to hunker down to live through whatever time period, almost unknowable and unpredictable, necessary to reduce unemployment. When 10% of the working population is unemployed two things happen: [1] the employed begin to worry that they are also at risk and [2] everyone forgets that the 90% is still employed. The Obama doomsayers simply are jumping the gun on assessing the economy because they were never happy about having such a different guy in the job. While the economy is recovering slowly, it is recovering, and when it does, it will be clear he was always truly in touch.

More...