I'll continue to try and explain why I think you should vote for the reelection of President Obama, despite his shortcomings,

that we're in the position in the first place.

I mean, I was prepared for a disappointing, pretty bad Obama presidency, but had no idea, even in my worst nightmares, that Obama would be as bad as he has been.  

He's going to move to the left in a second term?

What could Obama have done?

...

But I've never been able to come up with a realistic scenario in which a lot more got done, the economy is in much better shape, and the president is dramatically more popular today. Anything that even comes close is really a counterfactual of what the chairman of the Federal Reserve could have done, and I'm not confident that I understand Bernanke's constraints nor that a more massive intervention on the part of the Fed would have been the cure-all some suggest.

Indeed, if you had taken me aside in 2008 and sketched out the first three years of Obama's presidency, I would have thought you were being overoptimistic: an $800 billion stimulus package -- recall that people were only talking in the $200-$300 billion range back then -- followed by near-universal health-care reform, followed by financial regulation, followed by another stimulus (in the 2010 tax deal), followed by the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," followed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the apparent ousting of Moammar Gaddafi? There was no way. And yet all that did get done. But the administration hasn't able to get unemployment under control -- perhaps it couldn't have gotten unemployment under control -- and so all of that has not been nearly enough.

...

Link

W. admitted he had taken a whuppin' - or some such folksy snippet.

The Democrats now had majorities in both Houses of Congress.
The issue was Iraq.
The people had voted to end it, and had elected the Democrats to carry out their wishes.

In what seemed like a few seconds, Bush sent 20,000 more troops to Iraq while the Dems looked on like so many deer in the headlights.

They still look that way.

In Bush's case, apparently, it mattered who was President.

There is absolutely no indication that this administration intends to change its failed policies even in the face of cratering polls.

And you think as a lame duck it will be more responsive?

The administration maintains the same attitude so widely admired in the campaign -- it refuses to let whatever's happening in the moment change their strategy. They make a plan and never deviate regardless of the circumstances unless it is entirely obstructed and they are forced to veer from their course.

The administration's overarching strategy for governance has always been conciliation. I think it is a surprise that it is conciliation at all costs, but they have never been shy about saying they are conciliators by nature and intent. And there should be nothing surprising about deficit hysteria ---it was the plan since before the inauguration in January 2009 [...]

There's been no pivot. It's been a straight line from the very beginning. The rhetoric's exactly the same as it was the week before the inauguration. And to the extent they've changed it's only in some snall details -- carbon pricing, for instance, has been jettisoned in return for asking for a tax on corporate jets.

Link

And Brad DeLong gets it, too:

Back at the end of 2008, our questions (at least my questions) were: "What if the downturn is bigger than we currently think it will be? What if worries about a jobless recovery and the absence of labor-market mean-reversion turn out to be true? What if--as has happened in the past--this financial crisis turns into sovereign crises and the world economy gets hit by additional shocks? Then your polices will not be bold enough. What is Plan B?" And the answers were all along the lines of:

You are a pessimist. We are already doing unprecedented things to stabilize the economy--and odds are that in a year we will be worrying about inflation and unwinding the stimulus rather than about unemployment.

Obama is genuinely post-partisan, and won't have anything like the trouble Clinton had negotiating with Republicans: our policies will evolve as the situation evolves.

Back in the late summer of 2009, our questions (or at least my questions) were: "You aren't getting any cooperation from Republicans--they appear to have doubled down on the Gingrich-Dole strategy that you win the next election by making the Democratic President a failure. The economy really needs more stimulus. What are you going to do? Isn't it time to use the President's powers more aggressively--to use Fed appointment powers and the Treasury's TARP authority and Reconciliation to do major stimulus?" And the answers were:

We are doing all that we can.

This is really hard.

Things will probably still work out all right.

If worst comes to worst, we will trade long-run budget balance via a spending cut-heavy package of long-run spending cuts and tax increases for short-term stimulus to get us out of the short-term unemployment mess.

Hippie punching.

By the late summer of 2010, our questions (or at least my questions) were: "You are in a total war with the Republican Party. They aren't giving you anything. It is time to seriously push the envelope of executive authority to put policies in place that will reduce unemployment." And the answers were:

The best policy is to achieve long-run fiscal discipline so that the confidence fairy will show up.

Hippie punching.

And now it is the late summer of 2011. Our big question still is: how is Obama going to use executive branch authority to reduce unemployment? There are lots of options: adjourn congress and do some recess appointments to get the Federal Reserve more engaged in actually pursuing its dual mandate, quantitative easing via the Treasury Department, shifting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their do-nothing position by giving them a microeconomic stabilization mission, talking about how a weak dollar is in America's interest.

And this time what I am hearing back is only:

Hippie punching.

Until people face up to who Obama is, "hoping" he's going to have an epiphany and realize that, yes, he does want to be a Democrat, he does care about average people, he is capable of adjusting his strategy, we are just looking at more of the same, trending worse and worse and worse.

Yeah, Republicans are even worse than that, but when our choices are bad on one side and worse on the other, we really have no choices that will result in the good governance we deserve.

I'll go with...Door No. 2; I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Democrats assert any independence against a Democratic president.  No way.  No how.

Will I vote for the Republican nominee? Hell, no.  But I'm also not going to vote for the Democrat who wants to be a better Republican than the Republicans, either.

For the life of me I do not understand why Democrats can't recognize Republican policy when it comes from one of their own, so, as I see it, the only hope we have of slowing down and/or stopping the imposition of Republican policies is if a Republican with an actual (R) after his or her name wins the WH.

This could work even with a Republican Senate.

If Bernanke can drop sacks of cash from a helicopter to business, banks, and the wealthy elite, he could do the same to create jobs.

1. Use Reconciliation to get a second stimulus through Congress in the fall of 2009.
   
2. Expand the PPIP to do $3 trillion of quantitative easing through the Treasury Department.
   
3. Have a real HAMP to refinance mortgages.
   
4. Use Fannie and Freddie to (temporarily) nationalize mortgage finance, refinance mortgages, and rebalance the housing market.
   
5. Announce that a weaker dollar is in America's interest.
   
6. Nominate a Fed Chair who takes the Fed's dual mandate seriously and pursues policies to stabilize the growth of nominal GDP.
   
7. Appoint Fed governors who take the Fed's dual mandate seriously and support policies to stabilize the growth of nominal GDP.
   
8. Take equity in the banks in January-March of 2009 and keep them from lobbying against financial reform.
   
9. Use Reconciliation to pass an infrastructure bank.
   
10. Use TARP money as a mezzanine tranche to fund large-scale additional aid to states and localities to reduce their fiscal contractions.

I think Ezra is simply wrong. There were a large number of things that Obama could have done--there are even things he could do now, if he wanted to.