Last week Andrew Sullivan posted a chart, from Calculated Risk, suggesting why "the economy" was such a negative for Obama and the Democrats, despite the avoidance of true Great Depression-scale catastrophe and some recent minor improving trends. Jerry Howard writes with this elaboration:
![Unemp3.png]()
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>>I've added a few milestones that I think help explain the President's challenge with the public perceptions around the economy, and why the Fox News crowd and others have successfully assigned him with the a chunk of the blame. It's not fair, or right, but the timing of events has helped the right willfully obscure what really happened, and why it happened. [Click for larger]<<
Yes, of course, many other things were going on, but this is a very useful basic guide to why the Administration's "it could have been worse" entreaties fell flat. And also, of course, why this is a bad time to kick off a new austerity drive. (This annotated version of the chart may have appeared elsewhere, but I hadn't seen it before.)
