So How's That President Doing, Anyway?

If you look at the numbers, not so well:

The Obama administration recently created a new White House post charged with rapidly responding to unfavorable stories. They could have spared the taxpayers $72,500, since the mainstream press is already doing that job free of charge.

A case in point is the media's rapid and fierce response to Mitt Romney's claim that President Obama's economic policies have made the country worse off. Rather than investigate the claim, they've made it their mission to debunk it...

But it's clear he's made the recovery worse. And there are, in fact, many economic indicators that are demonstrably worse since Obama took office. Here are a few we've noted in this space before:

There are 2 million fewer private-sector jobs now than when Obama was sworn in, and the unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points higher.

• There are now more long-term unemployed than at any time since the government

• The U.S. dollar is more than 12% weaker.

• The number of Americans on food stamps has climbed 37%.

• The Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) is up 62%.

• And the national debt is about 40% higher than it was in January 2009.

In fact, reporters who bother to look will discover that Obama has managed to produce the worst recovery on record.

"Worst recovery on record." Sounds like a campaign theme to me. How's that "hope and change" working out?

Update, July 9, 2011: Let's add a little more fuel to that fire:

There was not a single bit of good news in the Bureau of Labor report. And watching President Obama this morning try to explain this mess and offer solutions to our predicament was painful. He was reduced to listing as one of his policy recommendations streamlining the patent process. That underscores just how intellectually exhausted the Obama presidency is. They have no more arrows left in their public policy quiver...

But of course the problem isn’t simply the anemic recovery and high unemployment; it is, as I’ve argued before, the broader belief that America is on a road toward decline and mediocrity, that our best days are behind us, and that our progeny face a less hopeful future than we did.

This is very corrosive stuff for an American president. And with every passing month, it seems, the news gets worse, our decline seems to accelerate, and the impotence and incompetence of the Obama presidency grows.