Did Obama's Failure to Stand Up to Wall Street Doom the Recovery?

The president couldn't jump-start job creation. He's also perceived as not standing up against "moneyed interests" on Wall Street. But one has little to do with the other.

Columnists occasionally suffer from a bias against the obvious. For writers with lots of space and an expectation to surprise their audience, there arises a natural prejudice against simple explanations.

It is simple to say that unemployment is high today because we suffered a catastrophic financial collapse. It is simple to say that Wall Street profits are high today because financial firms, having been bailed out by Washington, understand how to mint money in a global economy with ferocious foreign growth. It is less simple, and also quite surprising, to argue that 9 percent unemployment is the stepchild of Wall Street's enduring power.

Thus, this: "Obama's Original Sin" is the first column by Frank Rich for his new employer, the redoubtable New York magazine, four months since his left his plum gig on the New York Times Sunday op-ed page. In the sub-header of the article, or what journalists would call the dek, it's clear that Rich's gunpowder has spent the last 100 days generating kinetic heat, because the top-line accusation is explosive: "The president's failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second."

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