When 'worst' isn't bad enough

During an October 2008 presidential debate with Republican nominee John McCain, Democratic nominee Barack Obama reprised a common theme of his winning campaign: "I think everybody knows now we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression."

Yet during an interview last week with Atlanta's WAGA-TV, President Obama said the depths of that crisis had caught him by surprise.

Asked about "getting pelted in the media" for pledging early in his presidency that he would cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term, he responded that "this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized."

The president reiterated that notion moments later with "a lot of us didn't understand, at that point, how bad it was gonna get."

So how badly elevated has the federal deficit gotten under President Obama?

Far from being cut in half by the end of the 2013 fiscal year as the president vowed, the optimistically projected deficit in his own budget plan would roughly double the pre-Obama record.

Incredibly, that would be an improvement: If the current fiscal year's projection holds up, the deficit in each of his first three years will triple the previous record.

Meanwhile, our record national debt, $15.4 trillion and rising, was a major factor behind Standard & Poor's downgrading of America's top credit rating last summer for the first time in U.S. history.

And if candidate Obama realized in October 2008 that we were "in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression," shouldn't President Obama have better understood in February 2009 "how bad it was gonna get"?