Out of Focus?

Kevin Drum pushes back on the sudden spate of arguments that Obama did not focus intensely enough on the economy over the past year, instead getting distracted by health care reform.

I don't really understand this. Is it a purely political argument that, regardless of the merits, Obama should have been viewed as spending 24/7 hunkered down in the West Wing helping create jobs for American workers? Or is it a substantive argument that governments have limited bandwidth and Obama should have spent more of his on reducing the unemployment rate?
 
The former is puerile and the latter is mysterious. What exactly should he have done? He passed a big stimulus bill, and it's plain that there's no political will in Congress to pass another one of any size. He extended unemployment benefits. He tried to take action on mortgage foreclosures, and perhaps he could have done more along those lines. But the financial lobby fought him, Congress wouldn't support cramdown legislation, and banks have resisted taking part in his program. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency would be a nice pro-worker feather in his cap, but it wouldn't help anyone find a job and probably wouldn't have gotten through Congress any quicker even if they weren't busy with healthcare.

So exactly what would his "pivot" back to jobs¹ have looked like? Nobody ever really says. But aside from giving rousing speeches, the big levers available to fix the economy are monetary, which is in the hands of the Fed; fiscal, which he's done; and meliorative, which he's largely done too. The rest is mostly window dressing.

¹Assuming that this mythical "more modest" healthcare bill really could have passed any faster than the current one in the first place. Frankly, given the Republican Party's dedication to "What part of NO! don't you understand" as its political strategy, I doubt it.