Today, Republicans around the country are largely campaigning on the president’s words.        
Running with this argument, Glenn Hubbard and Kevin Hassett, economic advisers to the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, have accused the administration of providing a misguided short-term fiscal stimulus that ultimately contributed to a long period of below-par growth. And Mr. Romney has borrowed a tactic used by Ronald Reagan to defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980, using his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention to intone “this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office.”
Whether you are better off today than in 2009 may not be the most useful question to ask about an economy emerging from its most severe downturn in 80 years. A more illuminating question is how we have done relative to other countries that were caught in the global financial cataclysm. By that standard, economic growth in the United States has done surprisingly well.
The president’s early assessment of our economic troubles was wildly optimistic. By the administration’s early forecast the economy would be growing by 4.6 percent this year. Instead, it is probably going to expand just over 2 percent this year and next. Economic production per person has not recovered to its level before the recession. Unemployment is still painfully high, at 7.8 percent. The share of the population with a job remains near its lowest in 30 years.
But glance across the Atlantic. The economy of the European Union will shrink by 0.2 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. It is smaller than it was five years ago, while the American economy is 2.9 percent bigger. Even Europe’s most competitive countries are slipping. The Dutch economy is shrinking. Germany and Austria are expected to grow at half the rate of the United States this year and next.
Some will argue that Europe makes for an easy comparison. The European Central Bank held the economy back for many months by refusing to slash interest rates aggressively or pump money into the economy. Germany’s insistence that indebted Mediterranean countries cut government spending deepened recessions in those nations. And some other developed countries are growing faster than the United States: Canada, which didn’t have a banking crisis to begin with; Australia, a big exporter of raw materials that benefited greatly from China’s growth; the oil exporter Norway.
Yet the United States has recovered more quickly than other countries that don’t use the euro — including Japan, New Zealand, Denmark and Britain. The performance is all the more remarkable considering that the financial crisis that sent much of the world into recession was set off by American homeowners defaulting on their mortgages, taking down a big chunk of the nation’s banking sector.
The one crucial area in which the United States has performed worse than its peers is in jobs. Joblessness is at record highs in countries like Spain and Greece. But many European countries have done a much better job of protecting employment than the United States. In Austria, Germany and Belgium, the governments paid companies to put workers on short-time work rather than lay them off. Sweden also has a longstanding wage subsidy.
Alongside stronger unions and stiffer employment regulations that make it tougher to fire workers, these countries managed to prevent soaring unemployment. Total employment in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France and even Italy has recovered more since the financial crisis than it has in the United States. Though the United States has grown faster than France since 2007, the unemployment rate has risen higher here.
Yet the president’s critics are not suggesting the government should have subsidized wages or financed more public works. Rather, they have championed the type of budget-cutting policies that have played such a large role in thwarting economic growth in Europe.
Federal Reserve officials today concede they were too slow to respond to the crisis. The Fed was nonetheless far more aggressive than the European Central Bank, quicker to drop interest rates to zero and pump money into the economy, buying government debt and other bonds. Fiscal stimulus — an initial $800 billion package in 2009 followed by about $600 billion in payroll tax cuts and other efforts — was bigger and more sustained than in other advanced countries. Banks in the United States were forced to raise billions in new capital, which allowed them to cope with the turbulent financial markets better than their European peers.
Every step was an uphill battle. The Republicans who took control of the House of Representatives in 2010 argued that fiscal stimulus was wasted and counterproductive, and pressed for German-style austerity. During the Republican primaries, the Texas governor, Rick Perry, accused the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, of treason for debasing the currency by printing money to buy debt.
Today, most economists say they believe that these policies provided vital support to the economy. In its most recent World Economic Outlook, published this month, the I.M.F. acknowledged that the fiscal stimulus was probably much more effective at bolstering growth than it had previously allowed.
So where does this leave President Obama’s record? The Harvard economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, whose 2009 book “This Time Is Different” is the most comprehensive study of financial crises and their aftermath, contend that the comparison by Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Bordo and others is flawed. It mixes relatively mild recessions with deep financial crises that blew up the banking system. Recovering from the latter, they say, is painfully slow and difficult.
By Ms. Reinhart’s and Mr. Rogoff’s accounting, the Obama administration’s record on economic growth is pretty good: “If one really wants to focus just on United States systemic financial crises, then the recent recovery looks positively brisk,” they conclude. Among countries that suffered as deep a financial crisis as we did since 2008 — from Greece and Iceland to Germany and Britain — “the United States’ output performance is, in fact, among the best.” Even the American jobs market looks brighter when compared with other big financial crises in history.
 
I think that the economy is recovering, but at a very slow pace as said in this article. The United States' economy is expected to grow at a small percentage compared to the other nations in Europe. I think the Obama hasn't done everything in his power to get the economy on tract. Sure, he has done some stuff that has brought our economy to snail pace instead of a sloth pace. Based on his statement that he told Matt Lauer "If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s gonna be a one-term proposition." It's been three years and the economy is only a fraction of where it needs to be for the United States to fully be out of this recession. President Obama needs to focus more on budget cuts and how he can get this country back into shape. I also feel that he has something going and that we as a nation should not turn back now. We need for President Obama to have another four years in office. I have a feeling that he will get the economy back on track.