Times business writer, David Leonhardt, emphasizes that jobs tend to trick back after a recession as deep as the one we've been experiencing. It's not the fault of government or any individuals. It's the name of the game, particularly when Congress spends part of the stimulus money, meant to encourage the creation of new jobs, on a tax cut.
Centrist senators, whose votes were needed, opposed the kind of huge, $1 trillion-plus program that now seems as if it would have been best. But even within those confines, the ultimate $787 billion bill was flawed. Some $70 billion of it went to a tax cut that Congress would surely have passed anyway.
Even so, the stimulus package helped. Without it, we would be in worse trouble now. Meanwhile, Obama has been doing the right thing for the most part.
Mr. Obama has in many ways been a moderate. He cut taxes and demanded more accountability from schools. He neither nationalized the banks nor pushed hard for the so-called card check bill, which unions believe would expand their membership and which conservatives hate.
At the same time, he and Congressional leaders did succeed where Presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton all failed: putting the country on a path to universal health insurance coverage. The White House and Congress also toughened regulations on Wall Street and increased funding for education and scientific research.
“The health care bill alone is the most significant and far-reaching piece of domestic social policy in my lifetime,” says Neera Tanden, the 40-year-old chief operating officer of the liberal Center for American Progress, who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and was a top official in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In all, Ms. Tanden added, “It is hard to see a more productive session of Congress in decades.”
The problem is, without the jobs people can't see the progress.
I keep coming back to the fact that this administration is full of people who knew that financial crises tended to produce weak recoveries — and that the typical policy mistake was being too timid.
“We’re just not going to make that mistake,” Timothy Geithner, the incoming Treasury secretary, told me, as Mr. Obama was preparing to take office. “We’re not going to do that. We’ll keep at it until it’s done, whatever it takes.”
Mr. Obama and his team may yet succeed at doing that. But for reasons both beyond and within their control, it will take longer than they hoped or expected. And longer than voters hoped or expected.
The "reasons beyond their control" lie with Congress. You can blame Congress for its timidity. Or you can simply call a spade a spade: the opposition party and some Democrats refused to allow this president to take credit for an economic recovery and to prove, for once and all, that Reagan and post-Reagan economic policies, which brought us the recession as well as the dramatic corruptions and collapse of the financial system, should never be allowed in the door again.
