Barack Obama doesn’t have George W. Bush to kick around anymore. At least not credibly. Sure, he will continue to argue that he inherited such a mess that his own policies can only be regarded as a smashing success. But it’s been four years since the patient was turned over to the new president for treatment, and the economy’s stubborn failure to recover its robustness tells us something about the efficacy of the Obama medicine. Which makes it increasingly difficult for him to continue to play the blame-GWB game. So Obama has found a new cause of falling growth and stubbornly high unemployment: Europe.
Now, no one can argue that our European friends are paragons. They have fiddled while Athens burned; done too little too late to save Spain’s financial system; forced an exodus of talent such as Ireland hasn’t seen since the potato famine (I exaggerate); replaced democratically elected governments in Greece and Italy with “technocrats”; issued a plethora of communiqués that amused but did not calm the markets; and adopted policies that have driven deficits up by stifling growth. Plenty of stuff to warrant a presidential j’accuse. Except for two things: The American pot is ill-placed to call the European kettle black, and the president’s lack of personal support from his colleagues at the G7, G20, and other meetings makes him a less-than-ideal policy salesman. More important, the president’s attempt to set Europe up as the new fall guy for his failed policies—besides Bush, other alibis have included supply chain interruptions due to Japan’s tsunami—seems, shall we say, lacking in empirical support.
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