Ben Bernanke's cold comfort for Democrats  The federal reserve
chairman may have steadied markets, but will hardly have settled
Democratic nerves for the midterms Ben Bernanke, Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, federal reserve conference   There's certainly no
longer any pretending that there's any kind of recovery going
on. Those "green shoots" of March and April have curled back
under the soil. Growth is slow enough – about 1.7% on an annual
basis – that the risk of unemployment going higher, getting back
above the politically important 10% figure, is very real.  So
it's good that Bernanke offered a reassuring message, but it's
difficult to feel all that reassured. Usually, on economic
matters, laypersons like me can read the predictions and
analyses of the doomsayers (usually on the left) and the
predictions and analyses of the optimists (in the
administration) and split the difference and be about right. But
the Obama administration, in the person of Christina Romer, the
outgoing chair of the president's board of ec