“The Republican argument against the president’s re-election (is) actually pretty simple: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.” — Former President Bill Clinton, speaking last Wednesday at the Democratic convention.
If voters seriously consider the question of whether they and the country are better off now than they were four years ago, they need only remember the white-knuckle fear that gripped most Americans when the economy and job losses went into free-fall in the October-November-December plunge around the presidential election in 2008.
The subsequent catastrophic loss of jobs then — an average of 712,000 a month for six consecutive months until March 2009 — marked the entrance, under the previous Bush administration, into the dark cavern of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. The final tally for job losses in the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was 8.8 million, more than the previous four recessions combined. And the job market didn’t begin to level out at the bottom until January 2010.
Digging out of that hole has been a monumental task — a task larger than anyone, including President Obama, could anticipate at the time it was happening. Why? Because economists have a hard time gauging how wide and deep the ripple-effect of such a steep in-motion crash will be until it is actually charted in hindsight by hard facts and figures. That’s why economists are always adjusting and amending, months later, even their regular initial reports on monthly job gains or losses. By contrast, the depth of the Great Recession was an uncharted beast for the past 85 years.
That made it virtually impossible at the time to gauge how large a stimulus package was needed to ignite recovery. But in hindsight, it’s clear that Republicans were wrong to limit the stimulus to less than $800 million, and they’ve been even more wrong to make defeat of Obama — not revival of the economy — their top priority since then. Surely the economy would have recovered more quickly had Republicans agreed to pass his proposed job bills, most of which included earlier GOP recommendations. But they wouldn’t go along. As Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell bluntly declared, making Obama a one-term president was their top priority.