I lambasted, pretty much, Robert Samuelson last week for a dumb-ass column he wrote claiming that we don’t spend enough on defense. Well, this week, Bob gets it right, in a column praising President Obama’s handling of the Great Recession, which was in fact his greatest achievement, though not quite great enough to allow Hillary Clinton to win the White House—though it must be said, and has been said, that Hillary brought a shitload of baggage to the race.
Bob doesn’t even mention that the president had not only to overcome the worst economic crisis since the Big D but also the hysterical opposition of the Republican Party, which sought actively to wreck the American economy as a way of damaging the hated Barack. The president was definitely too kind to Wall Street, and, as I’ve said a hundred times before, shouldn’t have gone for the full Monty on universal health care, but when you consider that the U.S. has emerged from the Great Recession in better shape than any other major economy (and, unlike Germany, has not wrecked other nations’ economies in the process), Obama deserves far more credit than he’s receiving these days.
