By His Own Measure, He Has Failed Miserably

This gets said fairly often, but it deserves to be repeated.

Everyone remembers this chart, yes?

Take a look at that.  This is the chart that Barack Obama released in defense of the Stimulus bill in early 2009.  Basically, it shows the projected unemployment rates through Q1 of 2014 both with and without his stimulus plan.

Now, if you find Q2 of 2012 (right between Q1 & Q3) and see where those are, Obama claimed that we would be at about ~6.5% Unemployment by now without the stimulus bill.  His projection with the stimulus bill promised a little over 5.5%.

Unemployment- official unemployment, not real unemployment is at 8.2%.  That's higher than he claimed it would ever get if the stimulus was passed.  In real life, even with the stimulus, the numbers follow the basic line of the "Without Recovery Plan" projection only higher, having topped out at just over 10% before coming down to settle around 8%.

So, by his own measure he has failed.  His stimulus not only produced the promised results, it actually made things measurably worse than his projection if there had not been a stimulus in the first place. 

Even Barack Obama's defense admits his miserable failure.  His defense, though, makes him incompetent in another way.  He claims that he "didn't know" how bad things were when he made those projections.  Now, given that he'd been given that he'd been President for at least a couple of weeks- receiving daily briefings- and had actually been receiving briefings since he'd been confirmed as the Democrat candidate for President, the best that says for him is that he and his economic team are incompetent when it comes to economic forecasting.

In either case he is a failure and an incompetent.  Hardly the man you want leading us through these troubled times.