The automotive industry had collapsed. Now, because of the Obama Administration's policies to rescue the car industry, we're the number one car-producing nation again. The car industry is back, though Mitt Romney said: "Let them go bankrupt."
Furthermore, when President Obama came into office, we were caught in a war of choice - an immoral, bad choice - in Iraq. President George W. Bush and Tony Blair dealt us a severe blow. The whole world was telling them not to wage war.
We told them there was no basis for going into Iraq. Since then, we have lost British and American lives, resources and honour. That war cost us trillions of dollars, which took us from a budget surplus to a budget deficit.
Now we have left Iraq and the Administration has implemented a plan to wind down the war in Afghanistan, which is coming to a close in terms of American involvement. Billions of dollars spent on war can now be redirected to jobs, investment and economic development.
There's a lot more we must do to be seen as leading the world by right.
We have become addicted to leading by might and it takes some time to restore confidence and credibility. We're not there yet but we're moving in the right direction.
So yes, when President Obama took office, the US and the world were in a deep, dark economic (and political) hole. But now we are moving towards the mountaintop. Though we've yet to reach that point, the arrows are pointing in the right direction - jobs, industry, healthcare cover all on the rise, wars on the decline.
Romney and the conservatives have derided the comprehensive health care plan as "Obamacare". But the truth is that Obama does care. People would be dead without health insurance.
The insurance companies were charging higher and higher fees for ever lower cover and they claimed the right not to insure people. Obama broke up that kind of exploitative behaviour and today 30 million more Americans are covered. Obama's historic healthcare legislation will stand the test of time.
And all of this achieved despite the attempt by the Republicans to demean the President. They called him a liar. They said that he's not an American, he's not a Christian, he's illegitimate.
Romney offers no positive alternative for America. We are currently in the throes of a weather crisis, Superstorm Sandy, which has wrought havoc on the east coast. Railroads, subways, roads, bridges, houses, banks, whole communities have been devastated.
Romney once said we don't need Fema, the federal government agency now co-ordinating the rescue and recovery programme related to these disasters. He says "state authorities" (not the federal government) should handle that devastation - and private investors.
The fact is a state alone cannot handle such problems. And private investors should not be profiting out of such misery. It's the role of central government to be a part of the emergency repair and to be a part of the clean-up and reconstruction. Because of an act of nature, there must now be a massive investment in infrastructure. It will create jobs and contracts, new technology as well as other scientific advances.
President Obama had made the case for that before the disaster - for the need to invest in infrastructure, in roads, buildings and bridges, to reinvest in America to put Americans back to work. Now that he's leading us in this crisis, even his adversaries are saying he's doing a good job. The President's leadership during Superstorm Sandy is steady and confident.
I said four years ago that Barack Obama's inauguration was a magnificent moment in a five-decades-long race for civil rights in America and in the world as a whole. Has his first term stood up to the extraordinary hope he inspired? For black Americans, a ceiling has been removed.
But you cannot have racial reconciliation unless you have racial justice. Our Rainbow friends in the UK call it Equanomics - racial equality and economic justice. Black people are still facing tremendous racial injustice; we're number one in home foreclosure; the banks target us. We're number one in infant mortality, in short life expectancy, in unemployment. We're still very much on the margins.
A few have done well enough to become symbolic examples. You look at Colin Powell, you look at Oprah and you look at some great athletes. But you can't measure the progress of the masses of black Americans by the symbolic value of extraordinary achievers. We seem to be cherry-picking - selectively recognising black success while still disregarding racial injustice.
The scar on America's soul is racial injustice. It is the key to equality, workers' rights, children's rights, environmental security and ending war. So how this issue is handled is the key to the salvation of our nation.
President Obama's achievement can only be seen as part of a long battle for civil rights. His ascendancy is a long journey that can be traced in modern history. He did not come to us unilaterally. He came out of a 64-year process.
In 1948, President Truman ended military racial segregation. The Supreme Court knocked down decades of legal segregation in the Brown v Board of Education decision.
We won a big victory in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, leading to the end of segregation by 1964.
We won the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ending discrimination at elections. We staged the anti-Vietnam war protests.
From 1948 to 2008, there were 60 years of victories: overcoming obstacles, removing walls, pulling down barriers. Obama comes out of that process. He's a result of the years of struggle.
So has the issue of race in American politics been transformed for all time?
Absolutely not. The forces of hostility have in a strange way been reinvigorated, their fears revived, their anger rekindled. America has a deep-seated commitment to unfounded racial fears and, win or lose, those fears will not go away.
There are attempts to take the civil rights victories back. Our opponents are fighting the civil war of 1865. They're trying to pit states' rights against a more perfect union, the federal government. If Obama loses, they'll be empowered to undermine years of work. If Romney wins and puts right-wingers on the Supreme Court, the courts could rule to undermine the entire movement made by Dr Martin Luther King. Who appoints the next Supreme Court justices will determine the next 50 years of America.
The scale of the President's achievement is not just a matter of his complexion, but the direction in which he has tried to take the country. He has done a huge amount, but a unified America could have achieved twice as much. Instead, the Republicans have been planning how to make him a one-term President since the time of his inauguration in January 2009.
Their mission was not about job creation, bank reconstruction or to revive manufacturing. Their mission was not to rebuild. Their mission was at all costs to undermine his authority.
If the president wins, conservative right-wingers will not stop fighting ideologically. We must maintain our struggle to prevail. We need to keep taking the nation forward by hope and never backward by fear. We need to keep hope alive.
* The Rev Jesse L Jackson Sr is the president of the Rainbow Push Coalition.
- The Observer
