EYEAM4ANARCHY

The Huffington Post reported today that, during a typical hard-hitting journalistic grilling by the White House press corps, Robert Gibbs was asked to grade Barack Obama's performance after 50 days in office. Not surprisingly, he gave Obama a thumbs up:

By any reasonable estimation, what the president and the administration have accomplished in a very short period of time, even leaving aside the many challenges that we faced, the number of things the president has had to tackle, the number of things the president has moved through Congress and signed into law, I think not just this administration but the American people can be proud of getting us on a path towards a sustained economic recovery.

And no political assessment (these days) would be complete without the obligatory mention that the real reason that everything is a mess is because of the previous president's policies:

But... if we look at how our economy grew in the first sort of seven or eight years of this decade, I think most economists go back now and tell you that a lot of our "growth" was fueled by questionable mortgage lending packages and mounds of credit card debt. I don't think any reasonable economist would also demonstrate for you that that's a long-term path towards a sustainable economy.

Of course, it would be rather hard to argue against Obama's people in that regard at this point. In fact, I tend to be very much in agreement with Mr. Gibbs' statement that any reasonable economist would disagree with running up mounds of debt as a "long term path towards a sustainable economy." Which in turn makes me wonder why the Obama administration's plan to fix the economy involves running up massive mounds of debt during the foreseeable future. Actually, that sounds quite a bit like the plan that got us into the position we are currently in.