By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office.
Had he demanded more but still got only what he ended up with, he might have received more credit for forestalling a depression and less blame for the feebleness of the jobless "recovery".
Mr. Obama's advisers point to polls showing that voters prefer the president's approach to the economy over that of Republicans, and that even now he gets far less blame than his Republican predecessor for the problems that persist today.
Mr. Obama has managed, the pollsters say, to come out of this summer with slightly less blame among voters for the debt ceiling and budget fights than have his Congressional Republican adversaries.
For starters, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's powerful political adviser, would no longer be called a boy genius, although party insiders insist there would be less blame of him and Mr. Bush than might be expected.
Pakistani experts argue that the market's sheer size demonstrates that Islamabad -- which never signed the Nonproliferation Treaty -- actually bears less blame than nations that did but whose citizens nonetheless defied the prohibitions.
