Back in the first few months of the current administration, when I was writing piece after piece urging the new administration to adopt a more aggressive economic policy, what I had very much in my mind — and wrote about on a few occasions — was the possibility of a sort of political economy trap. If unemployment continued to rise, I feared, Congress wouldn’t draw the right conclusion — that we needed more stimulus. Instead, the verdict would be that Obama’s economic policies weren’t working, so we needed to do less. And high unemployment would also lead to Democratic electoral losses, further undermining the ability to act (since the fact is that today’s GOP is the party of economic ignorance). The result would be a persistently depressed economy, and a fading out of Obama’s promise.

I really, really wish I had been wrong about this — and for a while, as banks seemed to regain their footing and stocks went up, it looked as if the administration’s softly, softly policy might work out after all. But on the things that truly matter, above all jobs, reality has played out even worse than I feared. Today the unemployment rate passed 10%, a sort of brutal milestone.

The thing to do, I guess, is to keep making the case for doing more; in particular, we can hope that centrist Democrats will finally realize that timid economic policies are hurting their own electoral prospects. But it’s an uphill fight.

Who’s to blame? The buck stops with the president. But did his economic advisers make it clear to him that the proposed stimulus was way short of what the math suggested we needed, even given what was known in January? Or was Mr. Obama really led to believe that his stimulus proposal was as bold as he claimed it was?

I don’t know. But I’ve got a sick feeling about the whole situation.