Where credit is due.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Column

You would think that the first law of presidential campaigning would be to take credit for your accomplishments. And yet the current contest features two men who are unwilling even to bring up some of their most important achievements in office.

Barack Obama's first landmark action as president, for instance, was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus--a $787 billion infusion of cash that most economists believe helped keep the economy from falling into a depression. The stimulus added as many as 33 million jobs and boosted GDP by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Weeks after it went into effect unemployment claims began to subside, and twelve months later the private sector began to produce more jobs than it was losing--something that it has been doing ever since. Yet because the economy lost so many jobs during the recession and unemployment remains so stubbornly high, average Americans don't feel that the stimulus had any real effect on the economy, and indeed many think it was a huge waste of money. So the word "stimulus" never leaves the president's lips.

Similarly, Obama almost never talks about the actions he took to keep the crippled banking industry from completely collapsing and driving the economy further into a ditch. Beginning in the spring of 2009, his Treasury Department lured $140 billion in private money to recapitalize the nation's nineteen biggest banks by imposing "stress tests" to determine the strength of their balance sheets and creating a public-private partnership to buy their "toxic assets." These efforts got the banks on their feet at basically zero cost to the taxpayer. Yet Obama seldom mentions this astonishing feat for the simple reason that voters are still furious at bankers and think of all government efforts to help them as synonymous with a "bailout." (For the record, the actual bailout happened on George W. Bush's watch, though Obama supported it.)

Romney, too, has almost totally avoided talking about his record as governor of Massachusetts. He gave twenty-five speeches in June and July and referred to his governorship only once. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that he doesn't have all that much to brag about. Jobs grew in the Commonwealth during his tenure, though not by a lot. Unemployment went down, but only by a point. Romney balanced the state's budget every year (which the state constitution mandated him to do) and...