U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday he expects to be judged in the 2012 election over his governance of the American economy, which he said was still not growing fast enough, according to Reuters. "For me to argue, look, we've actually made the right decisions, things would have been much worse has we not made those decisions -- that's not that satisfying if you don't have a job right now," Obama told CBS in an interview taped last week and aired during his annual vacation in Martha's Vineyard, an island near Boston. "I understand that and I expect to be judged a year from now on whether or not things have continued to get better," he said. The U.S. unemployment rate has been stuck above 9 percent and growth was very weak in the first half of 2011, causing many Americans to question whether Obama's stimulus and bailout measures following the financial crisis worked. Asked about the past month's stock market drop, Obama said concerns about the U.S. recovery were contributing to investor jitters, along with "headwinds" from Europe's debt crisis, high gas prices and knock-on effects from Japan's earthquake.
