Suppose we had to answer these two
questions before we listened to another word, or had another thought, about
this presidential election:
(1) How much can any President do
about the economy?
(2) How much better off (or worse
off) could I have been if somebody
other than the incumbent had taken office at the moment he did?
I don't know how much a president
can do about the economy but I'll bet it's a lot less than those now blaming or
praising President Obama are assuming he can do.
As for having more or less money
than you had four years ago, you might remember the fundamental forces like
those at work right after World War II (all that pent-up demand), and if you
did you might realize that in some four-year slices you would have been in
clover no matter who was president.
Tarzan of the Apes could have been president from 1952 to 1956 and his
economic numbers would have been good.
Downturns, incipient recessions or
depressions, may be different. A
president's emergency measures can have an effect. But what are you going to measure that effect (even if you
can distinguish it) against? Your
projections (even if you can distinguish them from your hopes and dreams) of
how your candidate's measures would have worked out?
And speaking of your candidate's
measures, was he ready with them?
Where was he when we were on the brink of a great recession, or maybe
depression? That's the moment you
need to measure your "better off" question from. Compare 2008 with 1956, when there
wasn't a brink in sight.
A good year to think about is
1992. George H. W. Bush is coming
up for re-election after four pretty good years. But there's been an interruption, a downcurve in the graph
that, in the big picture we see now, keeps going up. The nominal GDP, the one people pay attention to at the
time, has gone from 6.6 and 6.9 in the first two quarters to 6.1 in the third —
the quarter just before the election.
(It will go back up to 6.7 in the fourth quarter.) No brink, not much of a recession (if
there was one it lasted only eight months), but oh, what a big deal in the eyes
of the opposition party. George
Stephanopoulos gets the press to notice James Carville's reminder on the wall
behind his desk, "It's the economy, stupid," and we're off to the
races.
Well, it wasn't the stupid
economy, as we can see now. Nobody
looks back to '92 as a year of decision, much less a crisis. All it gave us was a little swerve in
the prosperity line. But oh what
it did to George H. W. Bush. It knocked
his approval rating down to 37%.
And you know what? Within
three months, after a little swerve in the other direction, it was back to 56%. But the election had been taken care
of. What timing! What a gift to Carville and
Stephanopoulos!
Well, the American public was a
gift to them too, as it is to all campaign advisers. I'm referring to its capacity, to every busy human being's
capacity, to be swayed by little, twistable, sometimes falsifiable things. In this case it was Bush's polite,
unremarkable wonder at the powers of a supermarket scanner displayed at a
Grocer's Association convention.
The public, following journalists' slant (starting with Andrew Rosenthal
of the New York Times) and
publicists' drums, saw a candidate who was "out of touch with ordinary
Americans." He hadn't even
shopped at supermarkets, the rich bastard.
So there's one moral of the story: Don't get so busy you become a member
of the American public.
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