"you run the ship you get the credit"

You may get the credit, but in the case of the President and the economy, you don’t deserve the credit. Bush’s policies wouldn’t have prevented this economic mess anymore than Clinton’s policies would have prevented the .com crash that occurred right after his presidency.

Do liberals think Bush should have passed a law preventing working class people from buying homes they couldn’t afford? That is absolutely ridiculous. If he did that, or tried to pass a law that variable rate mortgages were illegal, he would have been hailed as a truely repressive fascist by both the liberal and the economically conservative community. The legislation never would have passed. It would have been like Clinton trying to pass a law in 1999 that prevented people from buying stocks in .com companies.

Also, FDR did not pull the US out of the Great Depression. My Grandfather lived through it. Conditions in 1938 were hardly better than they were in 1932. WWII pulled us out of the depression. FDR did, by levying huge taxes on the remaining wealthy, provide some ‘make work’ jobs for a few people, short term, and thereby gave the country the impression that something was being attempted. However, a lot of people argue that he prolonged the depression by his policies, and this argument makes sense when you consider that fact that the depression continued for 8 years after he was in office, and only started to ease up in 1939 when the US started to receive massive manufacturing orders from allied powers to fend off the Nazis.