President Barack Obama got endless guff for pointing out the obvious in early October—that his “policies are on the ballot” this Election Day even if he isn’t. Judging from the most recent polls, those policies aren’t wildly popular. The more important question is whether they were wise.

It’s fair to say I have a special obligation to grapple with this question, since back in 2012 I published a book about the Obama administration’s efforts to heal the economy. The book was largely a narrative, reconstructing events and internal debates as they unfolded. But it delivered a judgment on Obama’s economic team, and the judgment wasn’t favorable. Right there in the book’s subtitle it says that “Obama’s team fumbled the recovery.”

This probably sounds right to anyone who’s unemployed, particularly anyone who’s been among the painfully large number of long-term unemployed. And really from any perspective, it’s hard to get too triumphalist about the recovery. The percentage of the population that’s employed—as opposed to the unemployment rate, which doesn’t pick up people who’ve dropped out of the labor force—is still substantially lower than in 2007. In fact, it’s as low as it’s been since the early 1980s. Likewise, today’s median household income is about $5,000 below its 2007 level. That’s about where it stood in 1995.

Having said that, I do think my verdict on the administration was overly harsh. Job growth has been very steady the last three years. GDP growth has exceeded two percent in each of the last two years, and will almost certainly do so again in 2014. More importantly, as Danny Vinik recently pointed out, the United States has emerged from the Great Recession much more quickly than other advanced economies. The unemployment rate across the European Union is still above 11 percent, higher than where it peaked in this country. In the United Kingdom, which voluntarily adopted Paul Ryan-esque austerity policies, you had to squint to see any economic growth for a few years, until the government eased up on its masochism.

And the same goes for historical comparisons. As Paul Krugman recently observed in Rolling Stone, the United States did a better job limiting the fallout from its financial crisis than the typical advanced economy has over the years. We also crawled our way out of the hole a little faster.