Start The Trash Talk
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, September 28, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Media: Like groundhogs in February, critics of George Bush's economic policies are crawling out of their holes after a long sleep. Must be an election up ahead.
These varmints have been hibernating for years now. Earlier in the administration, you might recall, we were overrun with them.
They jabbered endlessly about the recession that this fellow Bush had gotten us into (though the recession began just a month after Bush took office, before any of his policies went into effect).
Then, when growth resumed, they descended on the torpid labor market ("jobless recovery," they called it). When job creation picked up, they moved on to the deficit. Then the deficit shrank . . .
So it went. In recent years, as Bush's tax cuts spawned a recovery strong enough to shrug off a stock crash, a terrorist attack, a new world war, an energy spike and a quintupling of interest rates, we've seen neither hide nor hair of our fussy friends.
Until now. Best we can figure, it was the payroll jobs report for August, which showed the first drop in four years. But whatever it was, they're back.
Pollster, communications strategist and Democratic adviser Mark Mellman was the first out of his burrow.
"It's not bad enough to be led by one of the most unpopular presidents in American history, through the most unpopular wars we have ever fought," he wrote on TheHill.com last week. "Now the GOP is being hammered by bad economic news that will likely haunt the party through next year's election."
How bad? Gallup says 64% of Americans "harbor a negative economic outlook, the highest number since September 1992 . . . just before George Bush's father was defeated in his bid for re-election."
Mellman cites other stats — from the slowdown seen by "blue chip" economists to the latest recession odds from the ever-helpful Alan Greenspan — that will warm the cockles of Democratic hearts. But it's the Gallup numbers that caught our eye.
We remember fall 1992, when it was all about "the economy, stupid," and the economy was "the worst since the Great Depression."
Never mind that we were in the 18th month of expansion, or that activity in the third quarter of that year was the strongest in three years. The anti-Bush media had their marching orders, and 92% of stories written about the economy in that stretch were negative.
Then, as soon as Clinton was elected, and even before he was sworn in, the percentage of negative stories dropped to 14%.
We're going to take a wild guess here: Mellman's missive is just the first of many downbeat assessments to come. Buckle up: We're in for some rocky economic coverage.
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