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October 24, 2006

NY Times Finally Prints A Story About the Booming Economy

The NY Times has finally decided to let the public in on the secret of how well our economy is doing. Of course, they do it with a headline that proclaims that a successful economy is now irrelevant to voters.

This Time, It's Not the Economy

In many ways, the economy has not looked so good in a long time.

President Bush Monday with the first lady, Laura Bush. He is campaigning this week on the theme that the economy is doing well.

The price of gas at the pump has tumbled since midsummer. Unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in more than five years. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average has finally returned to its glory days of the late 1990's, setting records almost daily.

President Bush, in hopes of winning credit for his party's stewardship of the economy, is spending two days this week campaigning on the theme that the economy is purring. "No question that a strong economy is going to help our candidates," Mr. Bush said in a CNBC interview yesterday, "primarily because they have got something to run on, they can say our economy's good because I voted for tax relief."

But Republican candidates do not seem to be getting any traction from the glowing economic statistics with midterm elections just two weeks away.

The economy is virtually nowhere to be found among the campaign ads of embattled Republican incumbents fighting to hold onto their House or Senate seats. Nor is it showing up as a strong weapon in the arsenal of Republican governors defending their jobs from Democrats.

"I don't know of another election cycle in which the economy was so good, yet the election prospects for the incumbent party looked so bad," said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist. "If something goes wrong, Republicans are to blame. If something goes right, Republicans don't get credit."

...Disenchantment over the war in Iraq has morphed into disillusionment over the direction of the country, breeding distrust in the administration's policies, surveys suggest. Moreover, concerned by weak wage growth, costly health care and eroding benefits, many middle-class voters do not see the economy improving for them.

"Voters overwhelmingly don't approve of the president on the economy," said Amy Walter, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan firm that handicaps political races. "It comes down to the issue of credibility. And so many voters feel so pessimistic about the direction of the country."

Richard Curtin, who runs the University of Michigan's consumer surveys, has found that even as consumer confidence has improved since gasoline prices took a tumble in August, the White House has gotten no credit for the gain.

"The one indicator that didn't improve," Mr. Curtin said, "was confidence in the government's economic policies."

So the Times can print one feature story on the economy, slanted as hard as they can against GWB, and claim they didn't suppress the news about it.

In fact, if they had been covering the story of the booming economy regularly since GWB took office, the Dems would have no hope of getting elected to anything.