“As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression, I’m sure Ben never imagined that he would be part of a team responsible for preventing another,” Obama said. “But because of his background, his temperament, his courage, and his creativity, that’s exactly what he has helped to achieve.”

But a second term for Bernanke didn’t inspire the same reaction from everyone. Via Real Time Economics, here’s Andrew Leonard at Salon:

Maybe Obama realizes that the really hard part is only just beginning. Unwinding the vast expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet and figuring out how to tighten the screws on the money supply without plunging the country into an another economic contraction will be a tremendous challenge. Why saddle that grief on some up-and-coming Democratic economist? It’s Bernanke’s mess. Let him clean it up.

Michael Shedlock was much harder on Bernanke, contending that he launched a self-promotional media blitz that led to his successful reappointment. He also included a video compilation of inaccurate statements Bernanke has made about the economy in the past.

Unfortunately, Bernanke’s win is everyone else’s loss.

Many economists included in the Real Times Economics roundup generally supported Bernanke’s reappointment, however. One of the more balanced views came from Calculated Risk, summing up the pros and cons of Bernanke’s tenure:

As Fed Governor Bernanke supported the flawed policies of Alan Greenspan – he never recognized the housing bubble or the lack of oversight – and there is no question, as Fed Chairman, Bernanke was slow to understand the credit and housing problems. And I’d prefer someone with better forecasting skills.

However once Bernanke started to understand the problem, he was very effective at providing liquidity for the markets. The financial system faced both a liquidity and a solvency crisis, and it is the Fed’s role to provide appropriate liquidity. Bernanke met that challenge, and I think he is a solid choice for a 2nd term (not my first choice, but solid).

Bernanke’s nomination still requires Senate approval, and he’s likely to get tough questions from senators about the Fed’s actions and its expansion of power during the crisis, Bloomberg noted. But Bernanke will very likely be approved, given the almost universal agreement that while he may not have been perfect, he probably did enough to stave off an even more severe financial meltdown. And in a crisis like this, keeping things from getting even worse than they already are is considered a measure of success.

Does Barack Obama understand the seriousness of the economic crisis? Yesterday, he laid out his economic agenda, and it was filled with all sorts of important exhortations and proscriptions. He appropriately condemned the “anything goes” policies of the last administration. He declared that government is now the solution to our woes, not the problem. Still, I worry that the president elect is underestimating the problem he and the country faces.

We may not simply be facing a steep recession like that of the early 1980s, from which we can extricate ourselves in a year or two, but something resembling the Great Depression of the 1930s. For starters, the current crisis is global, which means that one part of the world can’t lift the other out of its misery; everyone will go down together, which is what happened in the 1930s. Secondly, the downturn has combined an unusual decline in the real economy–employment in durable-goods manufacturing fell by 21.9 percent from 2000 to 2008–with a financial crash precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble. The bubble resulted from an attempt to sustain growth and employment in the face of an underlying decline, which, too, is what happened in the late 1920s.

Over the past six decades, policymakers have used some tactics from the Great Depression to quell recessions–such as spending on roads and bridges to create jobs, transferring payments to raise consumer demand, and infusing money into the credit system. But these stopgap measures, which are at the heart of Obama’s recovery program, may prove inadequate.

For one thing, Judis says infrastructure spending won’t be enough. The United States, he says, could do things like invest in high-speed rail transportation. Yes, it would be expensive, but it also would create good-paying jobs, revive American industry and improve the country’s trade imbalance.

Judis and others are thinking big, and they want Obama to do the same. The fight over the stimulus package, at its heart, isn’t a typical Washington back-and-forth over tax cuts or power plays. The stakes are much, much higher. It’s become increasingly clear that putting together the most effective stimulus package – right here, right now – is all about the economy’s survival, not political posturing. To Judis and others, Obama needs to transcend politics on this one, and take the kind of immediate, dramatic steps that this crisis requires. Falling short means the kind of economic failure none of us will want to live with, no matter what side of the aisle we’re on.