An observation based on Roy‘s posts: the president has accepted that his political goals won’t help the economy, and he still champions them. He’s no longer shouting “What do you mean, there are no jobs?” at his flummoxed economists. He has “evolved” to the inevitable fallback position, what Dario Fernandez-Morera, author of  American Academy and the Survival of Marxist Ideals, termed the “Misery As An Ideal” approach:

… once it became patently evident that Marxist theories failed abysmally in their “nineteenth-century pie-in-the-sky promises of socialist abundance” but rather “produced misery wherever they have been thoroughly implemented,” the socialists changed tack defensively to claim “that an alleged drawback is really an advantage” — which Fernández-Morera called the “Misery As An Ideal” approach.

In other words, no longer do socialists promise to save us by bringing us a greater prosperity — they seek to save us from prosperity.