Obama - We don't know how bad Obama is going to be, but from how it looks, it's going to be BAD.
Of course you discounted Bush and the damage he has done and is still being done by his policies.
We must give Obama a chance to change some things to get the economy back to level, then we can began to assess his progress. Just getting it back to level would be historic in itself. No president since FDR has inherited such a mess, and lets not forget who FDR inherited it from, Herbert Hoover, a repuke of the highest order, Ever heard of Hooverville shanties?
Hoover barely scratched the cluster fuck that FDR created. All Hoover had time to do was raise taxes to 70%. FDR raised them to 91%.
Which of course created a serious drag on the economy that was not eased until Kennedy lowered taxes. Followed by Reagan lowering them.
And, I'd probably have to state that Bush's tax cuts are probably the only thing that kept us from slipping into a full blown recession after the tech sector bubble burst, and 9/11.
Of course, it wasn't possible for Bush to keep the economy up forever, because the Federal Reserve (A financial corporation) has continued its inflationary policies of easy credit and devaluation/debasement of the dollar that lead directly into this crisis.
Of course, the easy credit that was created by the Fed after 9/11 probably also has something to do with the fact that the economy managed to continue to limp along after 9/11 and the Tech Sector Bubble going.
But the Federal Reserve's policies alone would have caused a hyper-inflationary collapse.
Or at least it would if the rest of the world wasn't so happy to continue to buy up our debt.
Of course, now we see them buying up our country with our debt. Perhaps some one should congratulate the Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) on slashing the throat of this country when he authorized the central bank.
Not to mention going back in time and congratulating FDR on screwing over our country even worst than Wilson did. At least had we maintained the dollar's link to Gold we'd have a stable currency that has not been exposed to the inflationary policies of the central bank that has lead to increasing amounts of poverty in this country.