It's a sure sign of desperation is when you have to campaign on what didn't happen, especially when you had nothing to do with it not happening and it might not have happened anyway. The President said yesterday that his adminstration was "able to prevent America from going into a Great Depression." A more-accurate statement is that he enacted his stimulus plan after the Fed had already put into place the policies to halt the downward slide. As I outlined in a post about a month ago, he doesn't own the recession or the halting of the slide, but he does own the recovery.
He also took credit for "health insurance reform, Wall Street reform, end(ing) 'don't ask, don't tell,' end(ing) the war in Iraq -- the list goes on." The first two of these are behind the dismal state of the Obama recovery, while the last one was in no way the result of anything the current President did. The rest of the list is more like the first two items.
