Wednesday, July 06, 2011

FOUR MONTHS LATER

A couple of things of note from the town hall. First, Obama came a bit closer than I'd heard to admitting that they'd screwed the pooch on foreclosures/housing, though it was more of a "harder than we thought" kind of statement rather than a "the predatory lending program known as HAMP was evil and awful" kind of statement.

Second was stating that they didn't realize how bad the economy was until about four months into the administration. Fair enough on that, but the mistake he cited was failing to tell us that things would continue to suck for quite some time. The right response should have been "more stimulus" given that they should have realized the original stimulus was inadequate. Also it's hard to square the 'we should have told people things would be bad for a long time' notion with the January '10 deficit pivot or the July/August '10 Recovery Summer.