An editorial in the Financial Times says, in effect, sure, but that is a feature of the times, not the man:
... [FOMC Chairman Bernanke's] recent verbal mishaps amount to such a radical departure from the record of Alan Greenspan, who also slipped up on occasions (although slightly more elliptically). At this critical fork in the US economic cycle any chairman would have trouble communicating the Fed's interest-rate trajectory.
This picture comes from a new Economic Commentary from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, by John Carlson, Ben Craig, Pat Higgins, and Will Melick:
Although it may be a bit hard to detect with the naked eye, my colleagues show that the market's expectational errors are statistically smaller in the latter part of the Greenspan years than in the early part. More specifically, they compare the period before February 1994 -- the date of the first post-FOMC-meeting public statement -- and the period after May 1999 when, in the authors' words:
... the Committee began to provide a more elaborate post-meeting statement that included both the rationale for the decision and some sense of the expected direction of the future path of policy. After that point, the FOMC issued a statement whether policy was changed or not. With these innovations, the basic elements of the statement, as it appears today, were largely in place.
But what is equally interesting are the times when the actions of the FOMC were not so predictable. The transition periods 1994-95 and 2000-2001 -- that is the end of the last two significant northerly runs in the funds rate -- just about jump out at you.
I've said it before: You just can't know more than you can know, and it is at turining points when you know the least. It was true during the reign of Sir Greenspan. It is certainly true today.