Answering Alter

Last week Jonathan Alter wrote a column in which he challenged the president's critics to "Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president." He wanted his interlocutors to explain why, exactly, President Obama has failed, not as a tactician or as a nice guy, but as a policy-maker. In Alter’s words, “Your mission, Jim [or anyone else for that matter], should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral.”

Peter Wehner at Commentary accepts the challenge with substantial gusto:

In one sense, the answer to the Alter challenge is obvious: Obama has failed by his own standards. It’s the Obama administration, not the RNC, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. It’s Obama who joked there weren’t as many “shovel-ready” jobs as he thought.

It’s Obama who promised to cut the deficit in half. It’s Obama who said if we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care cost curve would go down rather than up. It’s Obama who promised us recovery and prosperity, hope and change. What we’ve gotten instead is the opposite.

What makes Alter’s challenge particularly delicious is during the Bush years he spoke out about the importance of a “reality-based” presidency (as opposed to a “faith-based” one). “They [Republicans] could end up winning in November by distorting the argument,” Alter said in 2006. “But on credibility and the facts, they’ve lost.”

Wehner goes on to argue that on the basis of "credibility and facts" the president's accomplishments are deeply disappointing:

• Under Obama’s stewardship, we have lost 2.2 million jobs (and 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone). He is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.
• The unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent v. 7.8 percent the month Obama took office.
• July marked the 30th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level, the highest since the Great Depression.
• Since May 2009 — roughly 14 weeks into the Obama administration — the unemployment rate has been above 10 percent during three months, above 9 percent during 22 months, and above 8 percent during two months.
• Chronic unemployment is worse than during the Great Depression.
• The youth employment rate is at the lowest level since records were first kept in 1948.
• The share of the eligible population holding a job has declined to the lowest level since the early 1980s.
• The housing crisis is worse than in the Great Depression. (Home values are worth roughly one-third less than they were five years ago.)
• The rate of economic growth under Obama has been only slightly higher than the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression. From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, we experienced five consecutive quarters of slowing growth. America’s GDP for the second quarter of this year was a sickly 1.0 percent; in the first quarter, it was 0.4 percent.
• Fiscal year 2011 will mark the third straight year with deficits in excess of $1 trillion. Prior to the Obama presidency, we had never experienced a deficit in excess of $1 trillion.
• During the Obama presidency, America has increased its debt by $4 trillion. That is to say, Obama has achieved in two-and-a-half years what it took George W. Bush two full terms in office to achieve — and Obama, when he was running for president, slammed Bush’s record as being “unpatriotic.”
• America saw its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history under the Obama presidency.
• Consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level since the Carter presidency.
• The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.
• A record number of Americans now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program. More than 44.5 million Americans received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, a 12 percent increase from one year ago. There is more that can be said, but you get the point.

If circumstances don't soon improve this will certainly be a tough record to run on in 2012. Historically, the economy has improved after a recession, but this time we seem to be mired in high unemployment and low growth for the rest of the decade.

It'll be interesting to see how the Obama campaign tries to deflect attention from these unpleasant facts.