What recovery?

President Obama hit the campaign trail this past week, calling on supporters in his hometown of Chicago to help him "finish the job" on the nation's economic recovery.

That's what we are afraid of.

"I'm the person who is best prepared for us to finish the job so that we're on track to succeed in the 21st century," Mr. Obama told The Associated Press in an interview. The AP account went on to say that in order to win a second term the president "must convince the recession-weary nation that he deserves more time to help the economy recover from a recession that began under George W. Bush."

To be precise, the recession began in December 2007, just 11 months after Democrats took control of both houses of Congress.

"I think the economy is going to continue to improve, and I think I'm going to be able to make an effective case that given the extraordinary circumstances that I inherited when I came in -- the worst recession since the Great Depression -- that not only have I been able to yank this economy out of that hole and get it back on a track to growth but that we've been able to make changes in our economy," President Obama said.

We're not sure how many of the permanently unemployed or those whose home values and life savings have been halved believe they've been yanked out of a hole or are on track to anything but the poor house, particularly as gasoline prices climb, threatening to fuel inflation to further erode the value of what's left.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, a former professor of economics, observed that the nation's recovery from this recession is far worse than the average of all 10 recessions since World War II. If the recovery had merely met the average of those past performances there would be 11.9 million more jobs today, he calculated.

While President Obama was telling his backers our society would be fundamentally different if the Republican budget plan advanced by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., passes, Mr. Gramm was writing, "The problem is not just the weak recovery but increasing evidence that the economy is now on a growth path far different from the previous quarter century. Despite the largest monetary and fiscal stimuli in American history, in 2009 the capital stock of the nation actually shrank for the first time in the postwar period."

On Friday, the House passed Rep. Ryan's budget blueprint by a vote of 235-193, with every single Democrat voting "no." The nonbinding plan would over the next decade cut $6.2 trillion from the budget Obama submitted in February, though it would still grow the debt by $6 trillion and would not zero out the debt until 2050.

Mr. Gramm notes that if the "Obama recovery" had matched the 1982 recovery fueled by the Reagan tax cuts, the average annual per-capita income would be $4,154 higher than before the recession and there would be 15.7 million more jobs. "Under President Obama's policies, federal spending has exploded like never before. If his 2011 budget were implemented, this president would increase the outstanding federal debt more than the previous 43 presidents combined ..." Mr. Gramm noted. "Big government costs more than higher taxes. It is paid for with diminished freedom and less opportunity. You can't have unlimited opportunity and unlimited government."

Can we really afford to have Mr. Obama finish the job?