Mr. Obama and his advisers acknowledge that their focus has to shift, but the change is still likely to be challenging, and a bit disappointing. \u201cUnfortunately, the next president\u2019s No. 1 priority is going to be preventing the biggest financial crisis in possibly the last century from turning into the next Great Depression,\u201d\u009d says Austan Goolsbee, an Obama adviser. \u201cThat has to be No. 1. Nobody ever wanted that to be the priority. But that\u2019s clearly where we are.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Throughout the campaign, whenever Mr. Obama was asked about the financial crisis, he liked to turn the conversation back to his long-term plans, by saying that they were meant to solve the very problems that had caused the crisis in the first place. Back in January, he predicted to me that the financial troubles would probably get significantly worse in 2008. They had their roots in middle-class income stagnation, which helped cause an explosion in debt, and the mortgage meltdown was likely to be just the beginning, he said then.<\/p>\n
His prognosis was right \u201d\u201d and the pundits now demanding that he give up major parts of his economic agenda in response to the financial crisis are, for the most part, wrong. When you discover that a patient is in even worse shape than you thought, you don\u2019t become less aggressive about treatment. But you do have to deal with the most acute problems first.<\/p>\n
And Mr. Obama has a big incentive to do so. The hangover from a recession typically lasts more than a year, and this recession isn\u2019t over yet. So he will be at risk of the same kind of midterm drubbing in 2010 that Ronald Reagan received in 1982 and Bill Clinton did in 1994. In the days leading up to this year\u2019s election, as they confidently reviewed the polls, some Obama aides took to joking darkly that 2010 was already looking bad.<\/p>\n