How's That?

"What you're now seeing is profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it. I think that consumer confidence -- as they see the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act taking root, businesses are starting to see opportunities for investment and potential hiring, we are going to start creating jobs again." -- President Obama, 3 March 2009

I was going to focus on the plug for the stock market. I've never heard a President say such a thing. What if the market goes up a bit, and then craters, and stays down? This will be cited as evidence the President underestimated the contemporary economic problem while pursuing his social agenda. He has just associated his success or failure with the stock market, the very thing his larger statement was supposed to avoid. Yes, he can take credit if the market rises from here, but he could have done that anyway. Now it's easier to make him wear a collapse. This is just stupid, politically, rhetorically, economically.

But what's with the rest of this paragraph? For one thing, Mr. President, will we be _creating_ jobs? Or _saving_ them -- which, by the way, might be harder to _see_. He has just undermined a key nuance of his policy claims. For another, in a single jumbled sentence he has just associated consumer confidence and business investment with his policies. Again, dandy if they go up, but he could already have claimed credit. Now he's closer to the failures.

I get it. Savvy policymakers _know_ that markets are fickle, so they don't make promises about them. Bob Rubin famously insisted that Clinton should never ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. This is hardly a policy address, but these aren't the words of someone who feels in his bones the complexity and uncertainty of economic events. Either he is far more confident of his policies than I had thought, or he doesn't really understand what is going.

I have always suspected that the extraordinary estimates of his intelligence were overdone. I'm now beginning to see evidence of it. Obama has an uncommon knack for projecting mastery of the subject material. Moments like this belie that mastery.

Meanwhile, Brooks confesses he underestimated how Left Obama would be, and Gergen counsels focus on the economy. Obama has a self-supporting image of savvy and intelligence and freshness that has motivated observers to overlook flaws and read all statements charitably. Anything that depends on virtuous cycles and mutal support from interlocking presumptions is vulnerable to vicious cycles and wholesale reassessments. If the wheels start to come off this wagon, this thing could get ugly in a hurry.