"A long, long period of halting and slow growth was baked in the cake when he took office,” said Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff, a former adviser to Obama’s 2008 GOP opponent, John McCain, and the co-author of an acclaimed 2009 book on the nature of economic crises, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. “It’s very difficult after such a huge credit bubble and financial collapse to recover all that much faster than we’ve been doing. It wouldn’t have mattered if McCain had won. We would have been in a similar situation."

How Much Is Obama Really to Blame for the Economy? - The Atlantic