Let’s throw the rollercoaster into reverse for a moment, back past this double dip to the first, the initial drop into US recession, post-Wall Street massacre, as a new President rose to be inaugurated.

As the Sunday New York Times remembers it: “Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.”

This, suggests Drew Westen in The NY Times, is the story President Obama should’ve told:

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.”

He didn’t.

Obama was meant to be the great communicator. Instead, he’s proved to be the great compromiser. And so, when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US economy’s AAA rating the mainstream media didn’t pay much heed to the credit agency’s key criticism of the Republicans and their refusal to raise revenue. Instead they focused on its criticism of Washington’s poisonous politics as a whole, and by extension, President Obama’s failure to bring the divisive sides together.

It’s through the collective failure of the mainstream media and the Obama administration that, in the space of just over two years, the nation has forgotten their deficit didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars. That record, combined with a perfect storm of lax regulation that began under President Clinton’s watch and ran rampant under Alan Greenspan’s reign, has been lost in the nation’s collective conversation. Instead, a political movement fuelled by disenfranchised white Americans and funded by a select number of white billionaires has fixed onto the face of the US political process and by extension the markets, Vampire Squid style.

Hang on to your lunches, we’re approaching the next dip.