...it's sustainability.

Unemployment is high. The Recession has not abated. The Stimulus is a failure.

This is good news for Republicans, right? We all know that a bad economy (although inconvenient for some) is the proverbial silver lining for an opposition party.

Not so fast. It is election season on the other side of the Atlantic--but not in the good old USA.

By the fall of 2012, NOBODY is going to remember the unemployment numbers for June 2009. We are quite possibly at the nadir of this recession. Digging in and making our case against this president on a momentary economic indicator is tantamount to building our house on sand. It is much MORE LIKELY THAN NOT that the landscape will have shifted completely beneath our feet in three years.

An Aside: political tides can turn in a lot less time than that. Does anybody remember last summer when "drill here, drill now" emerged as the surefire recipe for our electoral success in the fall? We had good reason to be optimistic. The longtime hostility of the Democratic Party toward oil exploration, drilling, and refining suddenly looked like a lethal liability. But all that vanished in the blink of an eye when the bottom fell out of the oil market, and prices at the pump nosedived seemingly overnight.

We are foolish to predict that a trillion-dollar stimulus (no matter how wasteful and lacking in focus) is NOT going to contribute to, or at least coincide with, a revived economy.

We stand up NOW and say the stimulus hasn't worked--and we know this because the economy is flat. However, when the economy finally turns around--as economies almost always do--the President will look out across the land and laugh his hearty laugh and point in our direction and say, "oh ye of little faith...why hast thou doubted the wisdom of the New Day?" And the mainstream media will dutifully report the most amazing and most ingeniously engineered recovery in the whole of American history.

DOH!!!!!

EVEN WORSE. MUCH MUCH WORSE

Much more detrimental, we are enabling the President's dangerous mischaracterization of the REAL PROBLEM. The President too often intimates that overcoming the current recession provides the key to continued prosperity. This is a perilous and disingenuous conflation of the actual threats to our general welfare and, perhaps, over time, even our very survival as a nation.

The FACTS: the President inherited three distinct (although not unrelated) economic challenges. One is discomfiting but manageable. Two is super scary but seemingly under control presently. Three is Armageddon.

1. Recession. While recessions can be hazardous to the political health of presidents, in the big scheme of things, they are not so unusual or daunting--and not an existential threat to life as we know it. Recessions come and go. At the end of every downturn is an upturn.

Nevertheless, in ordinary times, a deep recession would be the top priority for any chief executive. In the face of a downturn, modern presidents must act (and act quickly). Graded on the recession alone, I give the President "passing marks" (with reservations) on his response. He acted quickly, yes, but his trillion-dollar stimulus was unprecedented overkill as well as embarrassingly revealing in its sloppiness. He also used the "crisis" to accomplish some political goals--but abuses of that sort are so commonplace as to be almost forgivable.

2. Banking Crisis. Much more serious. The potential meltdown of the financial sector portended catastrophe. We have all weathered multiple recessions (I have lived through nine of them)--but most of us have never experienced a bank panic. The collapse of the financial sector would have precipitated Great Depression 2.0.

Happily, we may well have averted this instrument of RUINATION. We are not out of the woods yet, but, if we make it, thanks be to Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, George Bush, and Barack Obama. I include the President in this list for having enough sense NOT to get in the way of an unfolding plan already in place that offered our best chance for reprieve in the face of looming disaster.

3. Structural Unsustainability. On this count, however, the president is courting a massive calamity. On this count, the President insists on doubling down on a gamble in Keynesian theory that may very well cost us our hard-earned American inheritance.

The President seeks to borrow more money than we can ever hope to pay back--and he wants to provide more government services to more citizens than we can ever afford. This president, as well-intentioned as he may be, intends to be everything to everyone with no concrete plan to pay the bills.

He possesses a fundamental misunderstanding of economic reality. If he is somehow right, frankly, conservatives are obsolete (and good riddance). If President Obama can actually do what he promises, we will all walk hand-in-hand to that golden shore of Progressive Kingdom Come happily singing songs of praise for an American Messiah.

If he is wrong, however, we need to be firmly rooted in reality and there to pick up the pieces. We need to be thinking ahead--and not just to the next election. Most importantly, we ought not to fall into the trap of arguing over this transitory recession. Whether we arise from this particular downturn in our economy (and chances are we will--just in time for the Election of 2012), we need to be fighting the good fight everyday in terms of fiscal sustainability.

Conservative Solutions must include a plan to financial solvency and independence. Leave discussion of the unemployment rate to the screaming heads.