This New York Times op/ed by David Leonhardt, “Who Gets Credit for the Recovery” is excellent in its discussion both of politics and of the long-run economic policy issues at stake in this election. Notice the prominence David gives in the article to the pattern Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff found of especially long slumps after serious financial crises in guessing that a full recovery is on the way in the next few years. I wrote about how the Reinhart and Rogoff finding should affect our judgment of Barack Obama’s performance in short-run fiscal policy in an earlier post. David makes a good case for the importance of Barack’s long-run economic policies.