THERE is only so much a president can do to influence an economy, but no one doubts that this year's presidential election will hinge on views of the recovery. President Obama has a decent case to make to the American people. Private employment is higher than when he took office, despite his having begun the job in the thick of the worst downturn since the 1930s. His predecessor, a Republican, was unable to manage net private employment growth on his watch. Since the labour market hit a bottom in early 2010, the economy has added over 3.7m jobs, and private employment has grown by nearly 4.3m—striking numbers given the pessimism that has suffused what many see as a disappointing recovery. His opponents may attempt to cast him as a lover of big government, but government employment is down a whopping 607,000 jobs since Mr Obama took his oath.

Yet this recovery is much weaker than might have been expected. Total employment is still 5m jobs short of its previous peak, and much further still from trend. There has been virtually no recovery in the employment population ratio. Unemployment remains elevated. Still, what has happened so far in the recovery may be less important than what happens between now and November.

Job growth in March and April was disappointing given the pace of hiring from December to February. These figures are likely to be revised up in future (indeed, the March number was nudged up from 120,000 new jobs to 154,000 in this morning's release). As my colleague notes, the fundamentals look better this spring than last. Petrol prices are moderating. Industrial figures are holding up, indicating that the manufacturing job recovery should continue. Construction remains a drag on employment growth, but new housing permit data suggests that may not be true for much longer. And the persistent drag of government employment cuts should also ease up as the year progresses.

Yet ii increasingly seems as though the fundamentals are not so important as what level of employment growth the Fed is willing to tolerate. As my colleague also notes, the Federal Reserve's projections are consistent with job growth of 150,000 to 200,000 a month; over the past year, payrolls have risen by an average of 169,000 a month. America is getting exactly the recovery the Fed wants.

Should underlying fundamentals drive job growth forward at a faster pace in the months to come, one would expect the Fed's inflation concerns to grow. When employment growth was healthier, at the beginning of the year, fed fund futures hinted that rate cuts might come earlier than the language in the Fed's statements suggested. Markets, in other words, were taking the Fed's late-2014 language as more conditional statement than commitment. Observed job growth was presumed to push up the date of expected rate increases. The Fed's failure to stick rate-cut expectations firmly at the late-2014 date allowed policy to tighten a bit in response to better economic conditions. That reads as though the Fed made a mistake; I don't think they did.

As this tension between Fed language on the one hand, and market expectations and outcomes on the other develops, the Fed may ultimately be forced to clarify its policy position. And who knows, the Fed may resolve the question in an expansionary way, indicating that, yes, it really is serious about leaving rates low for two more years, even if that implies inflation rates above 2% for a sustained period of time. In that case, fundamentals might well propel employment growth rates substantially higher. I'm not sure any of us should expect that to occur.

And so Mr Obama will be left biting his nails, pitching his efforts to the American people, and trying to explain why recovery hasn't been any faster. Mitt Romney will put the blame for that squarely on the president. And the press will debate over who has the better argument. But Mr Bernanke is the wizard behind the curtain. Had Mr Obama managed to pass legislation preventing quite so many government jobs from being lost, the economy would have run hotter and the Fed would have been correspondingly less aggressive—leading, most likely, to no meaningful difference in the pace of job recovery. America is getting the job growth the Fed wants, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that Mr Bernanke is not quite God.