Must-Read: Jim Tankersley: Obama solved one economic crisis. It’s the second that haunts him

Must-Read: Jim Tankersley: Obama solved one economic crisis. It’s the second that haunts him: “If you worked a factory shift in Michigan in January 2009…

…you were wrestling with two manners of economic crisis. One was the immediate threat to your job. If you lost it, you were in danger of losing your car, and your house too. The other… was the realization that… the economic future you were once promised was drifting away. That imminent crisis has long since receded. History will record that President Obama and his economic team presided over a historically swift end to a massive recession, along with a better rebound than any other industrialized country enjoyed at the time….

[Obama] appears to understand — to have internalized — that he was unable to soothe the longer-running sense of economic crisis in much of working-class America once the recession itself was over. Yes, income gains for the middle class were finally arriving in the last years of Obama’s presidency…. Yet they were still not nearly enough to bring the American dream comfortably into view for autoworkers in Akron, Ohio, or home health aides in Richmond, Virginia…. Real median income is just getting back to where it was in 2000…. For all of our detailed assessments and long wanderings through the Obama economic record, this remains the simplest snap assessment: He solved one crisis, but not both.

It doesn’t matter that he didn’t create the longer-term crisis…. It doesn’t matter that his record might look different if a Democrat had won a “third term” of sorts for him…. What matters is that Americans had grown accustomed to the economy delivering broad wage gains and strong job growth, in the years after World War II, of the type that lifted up workers across race, gender, and class lines, though certainly not all at the same rate…. What he did, history will record, was critical. But so was what he, and Congress, left undone…