I’m struggling to come up with anything new to say about this month’s jobs report. Ezra Klein has some pretty solid facts here. It’s pretty bad. But we’ve seen this already, haven’t we? There’ll be a few months of good job numbers, and everyone starts to get euphoric about the recovery. Then it falls off and everyone starts talking double-dip, until hiring picks up a few months later. We’ve only seen this cycle about a half-dozen times over the past three years, and it seems clear to me that the economy is not weak enough to falter completely, but not strong enough to rebound fully. Eventually I figure we’ll lurch back into normal territory, in a few more years.

What’s interesting about this report is that it’s already seen a few of the more stalwart Obama defenders buckling just a bit. I don’t really have anything against Obama loyalists, used to qualify as one myself, but I think Zandar misunderstands the nature of the situation when he recommends that Obama go the full Krugman. He can’t do this for the same reason he can’t bash the banks, can’t bash the insurance companies or the drug companies, can’t bash the Republicans for ruining the economy. Because he collaborated with all those groups on crafting major policy. If Obama had tried to attach some strings to the blank check Bush and Paulson wrote to the banks, if he had made FinReg a nonnegotiable part of the process, if he’d ignored Tim Geithner, that Tribune of the Upper Classes, then he could legitimately campaign against the banks this year, saying he had refused to accept a bailout without strings attached. But he didn’t do any of those things–he listened to Geithner, who was panicked that even the slightest move against the banks would crash the global financial system. You sort of get why the banks gave him the job running the New York Fed. If Obama pivots from that philosophy to a virulently anti-bank one, he’d look phonier than Mitt Romney. Similarly, Obama can’t talk about how his health reform is the worst nightmare to the drug companies because he included them in the negotiations (the insurers, of course, dropped out late in the process, after having some significant input). Obama has had considerable difficulty in selling his policies to the public because of the process that made them–he can’t just lie about what he did, as he’s not Romney and thus can’t get away with it–so he has to sell them almost entirely on a positive basis, something which is not only inherently harder to do in our media age where pithy attacks are absorbed so much more easily, because Obama can’t tap into the currents of anger and revulsion that the public has toward these industries, currents which drove the reform push to begin with. To do so would ring false. Obama has spent most of 2010, 2011 and bits of 2012 fixated on the deficit and debt rather than growth and employment, this is hard to dispute. He enacted the Budget Control Act after the agonizing debt ceiling imbroglio, a document which couldn’t have been more clear in terms of what Obama thought ought to be the priority in a time of economic crisis: short-term deficits. I don’t see the basis for a pivot toward Krugmanomics here, because Obama simply hasn’t governed in a way that paid more than lip service to the sorts of ideas that Krugman believes in. Even the stimulus was weakened by a bunch of nonstimulative tax cuts, the Alternative Minimum Tax patch, and so on.  How you play the game does matter. In each of these instances, Obama ignored the existing crosscurrents of public opinion on the issues, and the cost of that has been that activists have been irritated and that the public doesn’t understand the bills, or see the point to many of them.

I think this is a big part of why I’ve felt let down by Obama as a leader for a while now. I don’t think he’s been worse than Bush, that’s silly. And in some areas, his record has been great, even inspiring. What I’ve been hearing from him over the past eight months or so has been much better than before, and has been backed up with some solid action, too. But in addition to all this the simple fact is, he called it wrong on the economy. Took his eye off the ball and went for what he thought would be an easier time on the deficit, despite the history of the politics of the issue over the past 22 years. I know, he signed the stimulus, and that helped. But it wasn’t enough, and it got watered down anyway. It did pass smoothly, but the next stimulus wouldn’t have passed as smoothly, so Obama didn’t bother. That is now normal politicians work. But leaders are supposed to push hard when they need to, to do the more difficult thing when doing anything less won’t cut it. Obama did this on health care, to a point. But on the economy, at a point where he had a supermajority in the Senate and a big House majority, it didn’t happen. And I don’t really think that today’s jobs report changes any of this logic.