The State of His Policies || Wall Street Journal
Meantime, as Mr. Obama begins his fourth year in power it’s a good moment to recount the economic record that he’d rather not talk about. The President inherited a deep recession, but in political terms that should have been a blessing. History shows that the deeper the recession, the sharper the recovery, and Mr. Obama was poised to take credit for the economy’s natural recuperative powers. Instead, we’ve had the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and stubbornly high joblessness.
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The New Yorker magazine this week has posted on its website a 57-page memo that economic adviser Larry Summers wrote to Mr. Obama in December 2008. It lays out nearly his entire agenda for the “stimulus,” reviving housing, the auto bailout and saving the financial industry. If anything, the memo overstates what would be needed to stabilize the financial panic, but nearly all of the stimulus spending priorities that the memo deemed “feasible” made it into law. They simply didn’t work as promised.
The Pelosi Congress also passed ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, cash for clunkers, the housing tax credit, and much more. The only Obama priority it didn’t pass was cap-and-trade, which was killed by Senate Democrats.
Mr. Obama’s regulators also currently have some 149 major rules underway, which are those that cost more than $100 million. The 112th Congress hasn’t been able to kill a single major rule. The most it has been able to do is extend the Bush tax rates—which helped the economy by avoiding a tax shock—and slow the rate of increase in federal spending. This President has been “obstructed” less than anyone since LBJ.
Mr. Obama clearly has a spring in his step these days, figuring that the public hates Congress and thinks Republicans run it, that the GOP will field a weak presidential candidate, and that he can fool the public into believing only Mitt Romney’s taxes will rise if Mr. Obama wins a second term. He has only one big obstacle: his record.
