Whether it's a failure or not is dependent on how you characterize the goal. If the goal was to somehow take the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and keep that from causing unemployment to rise even as high as it was when Reagan was president, it's an objective failure. If the goal was to take the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and keep unemployment from rising anywhere near as badly as it did during the Great Depression, the jury is still out. The Obama team was quite ambitious, and judged against their own ambition, it was a faiulre, but that was a high standard.