Obama's 5 biggest mistakes

The president's Republican opponents will surely spend 2012 hammering away at his failures. So what exactly are they?

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2. Failing to fix the housing market
The bursting of the housing bubble six years ago has cost Americans more than $7 trillion in home equity, and sparked the recession and the near collapse of the U.S. economy. Home prices have continued to fall since Obama was inaugurated, and now stand at 2002 levels. The president can rightly say that the crash began on George W. Bush's watch (Bush's 2008 bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have so far cost taxpayers $141 billion), but after three years, it's fair to ask what the president has done to fix housing. Answer: Not much. Efforts to stem foreclosures and help folks refinance were poorly designed and have fallen well short of expectations. A short-lived tax credit to encourage first-time buyers wasn't extended by Congress, and ongoing waves of foreclosures continue to depress prices. Today, 22 percent of all homeowners are underwater on their mortgages. The problem for the president is that housing is not an isolated issue. It's tied to jobs, and until the labor market heals, housing will continue to grind along. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Index for November warned bluntly that "the troubled housing market remains weak and won't recover anytime soon." Housing, jobs, and long-term consumer confidence can be a virtuous — or vicious circle. They have been the latter for the better part of a decade already. This leads to what I think has been President Obama's greatest mistake of all. 

1. Overpromising on the economic recovery
How many times have we heard the president say the downturn of 2007–09 was the "worst since the Great Depression"? Here's the rub: Given that it took Franklin Roosevelt 10 years and a world war to fix the Depression, why on earth would Obama compare our downturn to FDR's — but promise to fix it in a fraction of the time? Consider this February 2009 statement to NBC's Matt Lauer: "If I don't have this done in three years, then there's gonna be a one-term proposition." And why, given the "worst downturn since the Depression," would the administration estimate that unemployment would only hit around 8 percent? The projection, made in a January 9, 2009, report called "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" (written by former economic advisors Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein) also forecast that the president's stimulus plan would create between 3 and 4 million jobs by the end of 2010. Fast forward just nine months, to October 2009, and the jobless rate hit 10 percent. (It has since fallen to 8.5 percent.) As for job creation, the administration was off as well. It has created 3 million jobs, but it took until the end of 2011 to get there. Because the president overpromised and under-delivered on the economic recovery, he may be right about that one-term proposition.

Read about Obama's top 5 successes here.

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Paul Brandus is an award-winning member of the White House press corps who founded West Wing Report in 2009. Follow him on Twitter: @WestWingReport.