File this comment from last night’s press conference away for future reference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. My question follows Julianna’s in content. The American people have seen hundreds of billions of dollars spent already, and still the economy continues to free fall. Beyond avoiding the national catastrophe that you’ve warned about, once all the legs of your stool are in place, how can the American people gauge whether or not your programs are working? Can they–should they be looking at the metric of the stock market, home foreclosures, unemployment? What metric should they use? When? And how will they know if it’s working, or whether or not we need to go to a plan B?
OBAMA: [After laying out elements of the plan] . . . Now, I don’t have a crystal ball, and as I’ve said, this is an unprecedented crisis. But my hope is that after a difficult year–and this year is going to be a difficult year–that businesses start investing again, they start making decisions that, you know, in fact there’s money to be made out there, customers or consumers start feeling that their jobs are stable and safe, and they start making purchases again. And if we get things right, then starting next year we can start seeing some significant improvement.

“Starting next year.” Okay, Mr. President. We’ll check back in early 2010.