Economists and private-investment-fund analysts told me that they think Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been doing the heavy lifting in policy initiatives up to this point.

A survey I conducted last week of several government and economic analysts turned up surprisingly blunt assessments of President Obama's performance -- even from some very liberal quarters. "His success thus far is the stimulus bill, which is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for keeping the recession from leading to deflation and global depression," said Thomas Mann, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

"The financial-rescue efforts have been shaky. What little public support for the effort that existed under Bush has diminished further under Obama. He has been behind the curve of populist anger, which leads to the kind of harmful legislation that the house passed Thursday" to slap a draconian 90 percent tax on AIG executive bonuses, Mann told me.

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, gives Obama mixed grades, too. "He's done a decent job of communications, though not as good as he could. A lot of his ideas are good, but there has been a lack of focus.

"He's got to make clear that priority No. 1 is getting the economy back on track. A lot this stuff -- healthcare and energy, for instance -- has got to be put on the back burner," Wyss said.

With half a dozen or more key assistant-secretary posts at Treasury still vacant, Wyss credits the Federal Reserve and Bernanke for doing the most to keep the economy's vital signs operational. Indeed, the Fed and FDIC are the major partners in Geithner's latest financial gambit.

"I think Geithner is relying on his former colleagues at the Fed for policy support instead of the people who are working for him at Treasury. The Fed seems to be the only department that's operating right now," he told me.

That poses implementation problems for Geithner's latest scheme to put Treasury back in charge of reviving bank lending, the key to leading the U.S. economy out of the recession.

Overriding all of this may be the market itself. With 30-year mortgages sharply down to 4.7 percent on average and likely to fall further, and home prices continuing their decline, never underestimate the power of homebuyers to respond to the chance of a lifetime to purchase a piece of the American dream.

Perhaps this, more than any government bailout, will get this economy growing again.