I agree with Biden. Obama took his shot, it would have worked better if Bush had not spent so much before him. And if Pelosi and Reid were not so dumb. That america elected a socialist was because Bush was such a fake conservative. Obama took his shot, installed some commie czars and spent some money. Unfortunately for the leftists, socialism does not fix a jobs recession. Lower taxes and incentives for risk capital do. If obama had the guts to let asset prices drop to where they should have dropped, spent money on infrastructure (as he promised), and lowered taxes on the workers... he would be king right now. However, Obama allowed Pelosi and Reid to make decisions. Those two were so dumb. They took his opportunity to lead and destroyed it. Americans may have been ready to "spread the wealth" around - but they are not stupid... you can't spread the wealth around by flushing down the drain with one time transfers which have no long term payoff.. They should have been putting in place mass transit and real heath care reform which took the burden from employers in exchange for more jobs. You have to increase the quality of life for the middle class - who pay the taxes.
There are actually a lots of them and Bush never inherited the clusterfuck that Obama did. "When I took office, our economy was beginning a recession," Bush said in a speech at a Mississippi high school in 2002. Bush's claim was rebuffed, if mildly, by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research which determined: The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology. http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0209/Blame_Clinton.html
You can use stats to prove anything. The internet and nasdaq collapsed - people were losing jobs and were fearing for the economic future when Bush took over. We lived through it. I got a 12% discount on a house from a builder in 1999 because nine house fell out of escrow in a small sub division when the internet stock market collapsed in 1999.