Last night Barack Obama devoted some of the first few minutes of his State of the Union address to the financial crisis, which marked the beginning and—who knows?—may spell the end of his presidency. “In 2008, the house of cards collapsed,” he said. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” By the time he took office, Obama said, the country had lost nearly four million jobs. Afterward, “before our policies were in full effect,” it lost four million more. “We” may have “learned” in 2008 that subprime mortgages were untenable, but we—and by “we” I mean “Barack Obama”—might’ve made note of it a few years earlier.