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Given the nature of the terrible problems George W. Bush has left us, I remain thankful every day that someone rational and intelligent like Barack Obama is our President (can you imagine McCain or Bush trying to manage all this? Oh, wait, we just had eight years of that). Thanks to Obama’s leadership and strong action, there is actually some good news to report on the economy: we’ve gone from triple red alert, every day in a panic crisis to some measure of day to day stability. That is a good thing, and Obama should get an enormous amount of credit for it. The fact that there is any good economic news at all is a huge relief after all the horrible news of the last nine months.
The question now is whether we can go from stabilizing the economy to actually improving it, and whether the improvement that does happen translates into real benefits in the economic conditions for most Americans. A Washington Post story with a very positive spin about how the economy is getting better quoted Anil Kashyap, an economist at the University of Chicago, saying this: “The feeling is that for now we’ve avoided the Great Depression. But the real economy is still in pretty bad shape.”
The good news is that President Obama’s steady leadership and aggressive intervention seems to have stabilizing the economy and returned confidence to our economic institutions. He deserves credit for that, and is getting it for the American public. But the bad news is still extremely bad; if unemployment stays incredibly high or even climbs higher, if home prices don’t start coming back, if wages don’t start climbing again, if health care costs and grocery prices stay high, if start-up businesses still are having trouble getting loans- if all of this continues for a long time to come, we are all in very deep trouble.
The American people know how deep our problems are, and will be patient for awhile. They clearly appreciate how Obama has handled things so far. But the Obama team needs to understand how important it is to deliver on tangible things that create jobs and make the economic condition of middle-class people better. Given how awful things were on January 20, the President deserves a great deal of credit for keeping our entire economic system from sliding into another Great Depression. That achievement won’t be enough to sustain him, though, if the real economy doesn’t start to get better. The President needs to be focused like a laser beam long-term economic issues that will ultimately decide the fate of his Presidency: creating jobs, increasing middle-class incomes, solving the health care crisis. If the country sees him fighting for these things, and making real progress, he will be re-elected in a landslide and set the stage for a long-term progressive majority.
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