At least Obama stabilized the economy, even grew it some, so that it is now higher than it was at the peak in 2007 before the crash. When Bush left office, he handed Obama an economy that was losing 700,000 jobs a month and the GDP was contracting at a 6.4% annual rate (Q4 2008). Under Bush, the unemployment rate increased 3.5 percentage points while the Civilian Labor Force Participation rate fell 1.5 percentage points: from 67.2% to 65.7% (had the participation rate stayed the same, the unemployment rate would have risen even further).
And look what Bush did to the stock market. When Bush took office, the S&P 500 was 1343. When Bush left office and Obama took office, it was 850 (a 37% drop during Bush's 8 years). As of this writing, 5/11/12 close it is at 1353, up 59% since Obama took office. (Google: Historical Prices - Yahoo Finance S&P 500 ). Clearly the business and investor community has a lot more confidence in Obama than it did in Bush.
I keep posting stuff like this over and over in the comments to news.yahoo.com stories on the economy, where the CONNEDservatives predominate. I sometimes get crap about how great the economy was until the Dems took over Congress in January 2007. To which I point out that housing prices were already heading down from their July 2006 peak, and there were trillions of dollars of credit default swaps and collaterized mortgage obligations in bank portfolios ready to explode if housing prices underwent a sustain decline. And the Dems weren't the ones that created the exploding rate ARM mortgages or that gave AAA ratings to mortgage bonds that were full of toxic mortgages. Don't get me started on Bush's "ownership society", where in a speech in October 15, 2002, he said, "you don't have to have a lousy home for first-time home buyers. If you put your mind to it, the first-time home buyer, the low-income home buyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else."
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