Whaddya know? President Obama is talking up the economy. Based on a drop in the official unemployment rate to just below 10% (9.7%, to be exact), the president said today that “we are climbing out of the huge hole that we found ourselves in.” Of-course, one can’t miss the knock at the previous administration even in such a short statement, and even one designed to be cheering. Still, while his optimism is dubious, to say the least (on a day when total job losses during this recession were corrected up to 8.4 million from 7.2, and when his own budget anticipates a rate of 9.8% even by the end of this year) it is not unusual in historical terms to hear a president talking up the economy. That’s part of what they have the bully pulpit for; to buck up the morale of the average consumer and investor and business owner, so that all confidence is not lost in tough times.

The problem is that Obama is coming very late to this task. In February of 2009, I observed in another space that one of the main reasons Barack Obama beat John McCain was due to the perception that Obama was a more optimistic and hopeful kind of character. Americans like that in their presidents. However …

[T]he day after the election, Barack Obama turned on a dime. Suddenly, he started telling us, things were not only very bad, but were going to be getting a lot worse. Inevitably. It was easy enough to see the point of this move, tactically speaking. He needed to lower people’s expectations of the coming New Jerusalem that would arrive with his inauguration, just a tad. He needed to set the bar lower with regard to how success would be defined for him in his first few months. And — more controversially, but, I am convinced, truly — he wanted to foster to some extent a sense of crisis, as it would assist him and the Democratic congress in quickly passing sweeping measures to advance their political agenda.

It was understandable the day after the election. But then it continued. And continued. Things were going to get worse, no matter what, President-elect Obama kept saying. There’s a reason you don’t usually hear presidents predict that the economy is going to get worse: it’s because their statements to that effect have a serious self-fulfilling power. If the president says the economy is going to be worse a few months from now, then why should I make a big purchase or any kind of investment? Of-course, American consumers were already cutting back on spending in a big way. But the constant gloomy predictions from the main man in Washington have without a doubt dampened any potential of optimism, and have helped send the economy into a true death-spiral. With consumer spending falling off a cliff, lay-offs are mushrooming, pushing consumer spending even lower, and so on. You don’t have to be an economist to see that it’s a lethal cycle. And President Obama, elected for his sunny optimism, has been unwilling to invest one iota of that winsome hopefulness in any attempt to buck up the spirits of the American consumer.

A year later, with the knowledge that the voters have decided that he now owns the bad economy, President Obama has begun to talk things up, begun to predict that America will pull itself out of this mire (he’d like us to think that it will be thanks to his policies, of-course). But in a real way, it’s too late. We have been living and will continue living with the consequences of the enormous downturn of late 2008 and early 2009. Inventories cut, orders not made, spending that wasn’t, plans put on hold or killed, at least in part because even the ever-so-optimistic-candidate-of-hope, once elected, became a determined Prince of Gloom.

Solely for political reasons, mind you.

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