President John F. Kennedy had presented a massive push into space. "I believe this nation should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the earth." The President had been pushing an economic stimulus program in Congress without much success. There was stiff resistance from conservatives. The American government, they said, should follow the example of American families and tighten its belt, just as they had to do. Living within our means was the mantra.

Kennedy had gotten more cooperation by invoking the Soviet threat. They had put a satellite into space a few years before and the United States needed to catch up. If they could put a piece of metal into orbit, they could do the same with a weapon. It gave them a noticeable military edge. It was an edge that had a potential impact on countries for whose allegiance the US and the USSR were competing.

The Kennedy program was warmly received.

Two days later, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was quoted in the New York Times. He had been interviewed on Voice of America, broadcast beyond the Iron Curtain to those enslaved by the Soviet empire. He was asked about violence against the Freedom Riders, touring the south in integrated buses. Several had been hospitalized by rioting segregationists. Kennedy responded with a prediction.

There's no question that in the next thirty or forty years, a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States, certainly within that period of time.

That evening, shortly before the President's 44th birthday, the Democratic National Committee hosted a dinner in his honor. Referring in part to the slowing economy, John F. Kennedy entertained the friendly gathering.

I will say on becoming President that the only thing that really surprised us when we got into office was that things were just as bad as we had been saying they were...

The audience laughed. It was a mildly self-deprecating way of slamming the Republican record, just 4 months into the new administration.

By all accounts, the President who took office 48 years after Kennedy was also surprised. President Obama has been tripped up, then tripped up again, then tripped up some more by the escalating economic devastation left to him by the Bush administration. The escalation is not in real time. In real time, the economy has been slowly healing.

The escalation has been in figuring out just how bad the economy really was during the final full quarter of the final year of the final Bush term.

When Obama took office, the new President got grim news. The slow down was not a slow down. It was actual shrinkage. The economy had declined by a staggering annualized rate of 3.8 percent. That was bad. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Federal Reserve were all bringing their own versions of the bad, bad news.

3.8 percent shrinkage. Shrinkage.

The Obama team was told by some economists that a 1.2 trillion dollar stimulus was needed. The team finally turned that down in favor of a substantially smaller program of about two thirds of that, 800 billion dollars. If it produced results and more was needed, they could go back to Congress and get more.

The new President told his economic group to bring back realistic figures on how many jobs would be saved or created. They estimated employment would get as high as 8 percent, then would begin to go down.

Congress cut the stimulus down to 700 billion.

Financial aid directly to state and local governments, hiring teachers, police officers, would have produced a much bigger impact, but that didn't make a lot of sense to policy makers. Not if more modest steps would produce the push that was needed.

But unemployment continued to rise until last year. So much for going back to Congress for an extension of a successful program.

A friend, a close friend from worship service, cornered me a year ago in the parking lot. We were promised a better economy. The new policies are not working. They're just NOT. She was in touch with suffering people and she was getting kind of hot about it. You've got to love someone who is humane and passionate about real people.

Only later did we discovered that the steps that were taken actually did work. They worked, but not at producing a dramatic recovery. They worked at staving off a disaster the size of which nobody, nobody at all realized.

Just a few months after the 3.8 shrinking quarter, the numbers were revised. Economists were stunned. The economy Obama had been about to inherit as he assumed office had not shrunk in that final quarter at a rate of 3.8. The figure was 6.2 percent. Wow. How could it have happened?

The first three quarters of 2008 had experienced a turn back in key indicators. The working assumption had been that the early indicators had to have produced a similar structure as time went on. That would have been true if the 2007 crash that was continuing had been caused by a normal business cycle. But the drop in housing, the bundling games financial institutions had played, the lack of regulation, had produced a genuine crash that went considerably beyond expectations.

Got all that?

Anyway, this was no cycle.

Then, as more data flowed in, another revision. It was as if Rick Perry, not President Bush, had been managing the store. The shrink rate for the economy had not been 3.8 percent or 6.2 percent. It had actually been 6.3 percent.

Oops.

Conservative economists, the ones dealing with actual numbers, quietly put away the models showing how the stimulus had not had any effect. Their comparisons had been way off. But they had not been the only ones with the 2008 4th quarter curse. It wasn't predictions that were off. It was history itself. Measurements. Pictures of the actual real economy were as accurate at the time as a funhouse mirror.

Three words: Dis Tort Ted. Yup. Economic history had been distortured.

The Obama stimulus didn't fail. The starting point was way, way lower than anyone knew.

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics had been wrong.
• The Bureau of Economic Analysis had been wrong.
• The Federal Reserve had been wrong.
• Private analysts were in the same league. Moody’s Analytics, Macroeconomic Advisers, and others were wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Did I say wrong? The famous 2008 4th quarter, the economic quarter that will live in infamy, does not age at all well. How bad was this raging, fire snorting quarter from the pits of Hell?

Final figures, we hope, have been produced at last. In October, red-faced, stammering statisticians handed over the astonishing nail in the coffin revision of where we were headed at the end of 2008.

The Obama administration did not inherit the incredible shrinking economy that was reducing at a rate of 3.8 percent.
Or 6.2 percent.
Or even 6.3 percent.

The economy, as it turns out, was shrinking at an annual rate of 8.9 percent.

THAT was one hell of an economic quarter.

Turns out May 27, 1961 was an interesting day for unintentional prognostication. Robert Kennedy's prediction of an African-American President within 30 to 40 years was off by 7 to 17 years. And President Kennedy's bit of wit presaged a future reality.

Things were not as bad as the Obama campaign had been saying they were.
Things were ever so much worse.