Collective Conscious

Ras­mussen reports:

A new Ras­mussen Reports national tele­phone sur­vey finds that only 21% of adults believe the pres­i­dent should reap­point Bernanke to another four-​​year term. But a siz­able 39% aren’t sure what the pres­i­dent should do.

Does any­body in that sam­ple even know what Ben Bernanke does every day? I cer­tainly don’t. What I know is that he’s over­seen the cre­ation and man­age­ment of tril­lions of dol­lars in assets at the Fed while defend­ing the world econ­omy from utter col­lapse, and that he’s done it with­out mak­ing things vis­i­bly worse. So he’s famil­iar with the inti­mate details of the finan­cial system’s woes from the Fed’s point of view, and has han­dled it at least rea­son­ably well.  That’s a pretty solid jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for him to hang on to the job, at least in my opinion.