FIRST, “Saturday Night Live” parodies President Obama’s “achievements.” Then Mr. Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize, bringing yet more head-scratching. Clearly, the nation’s attention is focused squarely on a question few presidents want to answer just nine months into their term: What has your administration accomplished?

I’ll leave foreign and military affairs to the Oslo Five and concentrate on domestic economics.

The president’s critics complain that his only real accomplishment is the $787 billion stimulus bill  which they deride, somewhat contradictorily, as either budget-busting, ineffective or both. But is that all there is? I think not.

STOPPING THE SLIDE Let’s remember that the new president was dealt a dreadful hand on Inauguration Day  including a shattered financial system and a national economy teetering on the brink of disaster. The administration’s chief accomplishment to date surely is devising and executing  with huge assists from the Federal Reserve  a comprehensive program to pull us back from the abyss. The stimulus was just one component.

With the unemployment rate near 10 percent, it is difficult, inappropriate and premature to stand up and cheer about the state of the economy. But the improvement should not be belittled. Growth of the gross domestic product in the second half of 2009 is likely to exceed 3 percent, a vastly better outlook than just six months ago, when the consensus forecast was 1 percent. Thus Job No. 1  stopping the train wreck  appears to have been done rather well.