The Great 2012 Debate: Who Broke the Economy?

Are you less-bad off today than you were four years ago? How about 10 years ago?

Those are the questions rising to the top of the 2012 presidential campaign. The general-election contest between President Obama and his presumptive Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, is shaping up to be less a debate about how to get Americans back to work than it is a re-litigation of a decade of recent economic history.

Romney’s core attack on Obama is that he’s made a bad economic situation worse. Obama’s main response is that Romney wants to go back to the policies that made the economy bad in the first place.

In other words, we’ll get to Morning in America, just as soon as we’re done sorting out whom to blame for nightfall.

Some of that is inevitable. Obama must account for his record in leading the United States through severe recession and the halting and often weak recovery that has followed it. Nearly 13 million Americans today want to work but can’t find a job, and GDP growth remains slower than post-war norms. Read more.......