Is Obama winning?

The president's long-game strategy has confounded a town with a famously short attention span. With Obama doubling down on health reform, our columnist doubles down on Obama.
posted on March 11, 2010
Robert Shrum

As the dreary winter winds down, the political weather is also changing. On the economy, the green shoots of recovery, seeded more than a year ago, may now have their spring. On health care, the Obama renaissance is real—a historic achievement is within reach. And as these events unfold, the media, in an act of swift revisionism, may conclude that the White House, rather than falling victim to an internal conflict between idealism and pragmatism, has instead married them to advance its ambitious agenda.

First, the economy.

The devoutly conservative Larry Kudlow, of the Reagan administration and CNBC, insisted on Obama’s inauguration day that markets were the most reliable predictors of the future. He was right. With unemployment down from peak levels and job losses ebbing, with housing prices stabilized and other indicators pointing up, the Standard & Poor’s stock index has soared nearly 70 percent since its March 2009 lows—and nearly 40 percent since Obama took office with an economy teetering on the brink of depression.

This remarkable rise anticipates as many as hundreds of thousands of jobs, which forecasters are now predicting not for next year but for this month. During the interregnum between passage of the stimulus bill last year and its impact this year, the president was urged to focus solely on "jobs, jobs, jobs"—as though the mantra itself would create them. But his policies had already averted the depression and begun to reverse the decline. More stimulus would help, and it will come—not in a largely symbolic jobs bill but in the Keynesian deficits of Obama’s new budget.

(More here.)