Gambling With Liberalism's Future

Ross Douthat says that President Obama's popularity will diminish dramatically, as will liberalism's prospects, without an economic recovery:

If you're running enormous deficits and don't have any economic growth to show for it, it doesn't matter how popular your social-spending programs are in the short run, as more than a few ex-Latin American leaders will be happy to attest. And what does make the Obama strategy misguided is that it looks increasingly like a substitute for a depression-fighting strategy - and what's worse, a substitute that has the potential to actually make matters worse, when Obama, liberalism, and America all desperately need things to get better.