Yes, obviously that's exactly what you're doing. The claim was that it was the worst recovery. There are all sorts of ways a recovery could be measured: its impact on median incomes, its impact on the poverty rate, its impact on the fiscal balance, its impact on job count, its impact on private debt, its impact on median net worths, its impact on secondary measures of social well-being, and so on. You selected a single measure: it's impact on real annual production. There's nothing wrong with that measure. It gives us one view of the quality of an economic recovery. But when that's ALL you want to look at then, obviously, you're cherry-picking.
Yes, I'm glad you brought up the Federal Reserve, since that's another factor to consider when judging the recovery. This wasn't a recovery super-charged by the Fed dropping interest rates, as during the Reagan or Bush recoveries. Quite the contrary -- at no point in the Obama presidency were interest rates lower than what he inherited, and the interest rate by the end of Obama's presidency was higher than what he'd inherited from Bush, which represents an additional external drag on the recovery -- but one that arguably put us on a stronger footing, in terms of fundamentals.
Actually, housing value growth in the Obama years was fairly typical, net. This wasn't a "bubble recovery" like the Bush years, when artificially high housing cost growth stimulated a lot of unsustainable activity in the construction sector, while also resulting in a huge flow of capital into the country from foreign investors, by way of those exotic securitized mortgage obligations. It was more of a "plain vanilla" fundamentals recovery. These days, though, we're back to having a sugar-rush, by way of rapidly increasing deficits and private debt. Conservatives like to pretend they care about that kind of thing, but only when the president is not from their masters' party.
