Obama's Failures

We still went into recovery mode remarkably fast. The recovery itself hasn't been so fast. A lot of those 19th century bank failures of the 10th centuries involved bank failures and they were deeper and nastier than this one.

The Reagan era recession was unique because it was accompanied by inflation and can hardly be compared to this one caused by the collapse of the real estate market.

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As I said before, this is pretty meaningless if "recovery mode" is just a binary phrase meaning "not technically in a recession." A recovery that takes a decade to recover is a misnomer. And it's still wildly at odds with what Obama predicted, so, at bare minimum, he misunderstood the crisis and dramatically oversold his solution. And that's the most generous interpretation of the facts.

Which certainly begs the question as to why you compared them, and implied that the current recovery was about the same.

In terms of unemployment coming down at the close of their first four years it is not that different. Obama's unemplyment rate is a little higher, but has gotten below eight percent, close to where it was when he took office. That is probably what took him out of the danger zone of being re-elected

Yeah, you said both those things before, and I already replied to both of them, most recently here. To wit:

1) We're evaluating actual performance, so simply speculating that job growth could improve isn't a defense of that performance. So far, the pace of the "recovery" is horrendously slow. You can't dispute actual performance by guessing it might get better.

2) Reagan's unemployment rate was flat even with a slightly rising labor force participation rate. Obama's is held down something like 3% by a dropping participation rate. I've pointed this out a few times now.

If Obama is re-elected we will have a better understanding of his performance. The last two months suggest the economy has turned a corner so your projections of a decade of slow recovery would be very pessimistic.

Except the last two months are only slightly higher than the same pace used to reach that number. It isn't a number based on his entire term, it's just below the same numbers that apparently show we've "turned a corner."

Can I assume the Reagan thing is done with now? Or are we going to continue the charade that the employment situations are comparable because people who have stopped looking for work shouldn't count as unemployed?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmou...ng-conclusion/

That doesn't answer my question, nor does it explain your assertion that we're seeing comparable employment numbers. That's simply false.

Also, it's the very first result you get when you google "obama reagan recovery," so I'm inclined to think you're making this up as you go and looking for arguments after the fact. Which would explain why some of the arguments contradict the others.

It is not the first thing I found when I googled.

If the Reagan recovery cannot be directly attributed to his tax cuts, then the recovery is not remarkable if the factors that led to it were not directly related to that. But the recovery under both presidents is not so different. Obama faced a bigger economic meltdown while Reagan had the lingering problems brought on by the Viet Nam War creating stagnant unemployment and high inflation. Paul Volker had already done much of the heavy lifting to reduce inflation when Reagan entrered office, which temporarily triggered even higher unemployment. It was you who first brought up the Obama/Reagan comparison.

Er, no, you did, right here. If you want to argue that the two are incomparable, that might be reasonable. But you tried to argue the exact opposite originally, and the data don't fit that. At all. Not GDP, not employment.

I'm wondering after the election if Yoda and Will be still be debating?

I have an attitude....after the game have a beer. Loser shouts.

Well, the losers tomorrow will be the people, so that's a lot of alcohol.

Well, what I know about American Politics, they have been remaindering for awhile. China will become the superpower in say...15 years.

Last point I want to make before the voting today is that you can see from the responses here why the Obama campaign's strategy is to try to make Mitt Romney (Mitt Romney!) seem scary: it's all they have.

Either it's vague slogans about the recovery that the data flat-out contradicts, or it's "Yes, but" with an immediate segue into talking about Romney. When you ask them to defend Obama's record, they're completely flustered. There's just nothing there.

Mitt Romney is scary.

What does he actually believe?

Do you know?

I have never seen anyone running for president who has been all over the map.

The current Republican Party caught up in the right wing mania of the tea party loons is scary and there is no evidence Mitt Romney has the political courage to stand up to them.

His foreign policy until he decided to flip flop in the last debate looked like a return to the scary, confrontational, go alone, America me first, let's go to war strategy of the Bush years.

Change isn't such a good thing if the change looks like it could be worse than the status quo.

Thanks for really driving this one home for me.

That is why Romney will probably lose because elections are not just about how well the economy is doing, it is about the other guy and what he will do.

If you want to put it in that is all they have terms , that is fine, but the president's job performance according to the polling is respectable so doesn't match up with your analysis he has been a miserable failure.

To paraphrase something I saw on Twitter: Romney puts women in binders, Obama puts ambassadors in caskets.

Harsh, but true. The greatest failure of Obama's administration is the blood of Americans dripping from his fingers. Fast and Furious, Benghazi, etc.

See, when you say that, all I hear is "I can't win an argument on the issues, so I'm going to appeal to general opinion." When are you going to get that elections are not arbiters of truth? Never-thirty on the 30th of Nevertober?

No. You wanna know what's scary?

This Michelle Obama mask!



LOOK at that thing!