Or to put it more precisely i suppose. If I had to guess based on watching the economy AND Obama is that Obama came in with the same Keynesian influenced monetarism that every president since Reagan practiced. (including Reagan.)
This can be seen by him outright vetoing the plan between Bush officials and Senate to force banks to write down a percentage of their bad mortgages if they took government bailouts and various other things, just trying to do everything to bail out the losers and make sure nothing gets in the way of that, or makes them face any real consequences.
The stock market rebounded (at least relative to everybody else) and wealth creation capture by the wealthy reached levels that hadn't been seen since World War 2.
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf
In the middle of this, the Tea party showed up... angry poor people mad that rich people got bailouts and advantages while they got nothing and the deficit rose.
I think Obama mostly ignored them because they were mostly republican and people were quick to call them racists. (With no real documented proof but we were still in the "Obama high" years.)
Then in 2011 OWS showed up... angry upper middle class people mad the rich got bailouts and advantages. Now these were mostly democrats... his voting base. Hell the part of it that likely got him elected...
at this point I think he started looking at things seriously and noticed that most people were doing pretty awful still despite what the Keynesian focus on the big picture formula/number was saying. It started to dawn on him that boosting up aggregate demand isn't the end all be all, and what is boosting the demand is important.
Unfortunately, instead of looking at what was wrong with his stimulus plan structurally, and how to make things easier for everybody to grow like wall street. He instead has focused and blamed the people succeeding... in the very system he created that allowed them to succeed to much while not doing anything for anybody else... creating a new plan to basically slow them down, so everyone is more equal.... rather then looking at actual ways to speed up everybody else.
Additionally he's casting a big net, not just at those who succeeded but everybody in that group, even those still struggling.
