Politics & Power Quote by Howard Dean

Dean is doing two things at once: defending a sluggish recovery and prosecuting a political case. The sentence looks like a policy assessment, but it’s built as a narrative of inheritance - Obama as the janitor handed a disaster zone, Bush as the one who left the gas on. That “hole that was dug” metaphor is deliberately physical and moral. A hole isn’t just a recessionary dip; it’s damage caused by someone’s choices, and it implies you don’t climb out quickly without extraordinary effort.

The key move is his hedge that’s also an intensifier: “far worse than anybody could imagine.” It inoculates Obama against the usual impatience (“why isn’t it fixed yet?”) by arguing the public never saw the full depth of the problem. It also smuggles in an accusation: if the mess was unimaginable, then the prior administration was either reckless, deceitful, or both. Dean’s “I think” signals conversational modesty, but the claim that follows is sweeping; the softness at the front end is a rhetorical cushion for a hard partisan blow.

Context matters: post-2008 Democrats were trying to hold together a coalition of economists, anxious voters, and disillusioned progressives. This line speaks to all three. It frames recovery not as a referendum on Obama’s competence but as an aftershock from Bush-era policy - a recalibration of blame, and an attempt to buy time, patience, and political permission for incremental results.