Advance excerpts from Bill Clinton’s big speech tonight have him making the obvious argument:

In Tampa the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn’t finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in.

But is the economy being cleaned up?

The best case for that proposition, I think, comes if you believe that excessive household debt was at the core of the issue. Obviously this is a view I like; Gauti Eggertsson and I have done some formal modeling (pdf), and Atif Mian and Amir Sufi (pdf) have provided strong empirical evidence.

And if that’s what you think the problem is, we have in fact made significant progress. Here’s the ratio of household liabilities to GDP:

Between debt repayment, defaults, and — since recovery began in mid-2009 — rising income, the US has made a lot of progress in deleveraging. Add in the fact that we’ve worked off the excess construction from the Bush years, and there’s a pretty good case that the stage has been set for a much stronger recovery over the next few years.

Even if that’s true, by the way, inadequate stimulus and debt relief have inflicted huge, gratuitous suffering. But the case that we have been healing all the same is pretty good.