Andrew Sullivan: “One profound thing has happened this year. It has become clear that the 2007 recession was much, much more severe than we realized at the time; and that the employment recovery is likely to be stalled for as long as it takes for Americans to pay down more debt. This is not that surprising. We knew this was a bad one; and we also knew that recoveries after financial crashes tend to last longer. But politically, it has up-ended the core strategy of Obama’s re-election. The bet was that recovery would be visible enough by 2012 for voters to remember who got us into this mess and be patient with those trying to get us out of it.”

“For the most part, it seems to me that the bet has failed.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire