Clinton’s Perfect Economy Is Now A “Grim Picture” For The Media Today
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is reporting the March job report as a “grim picture”:
It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long. Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. . . .
The grim picture described by the Labor Department on Friday provided stark evidence of just how much the jobs market has buckled under the weight of the housing, credit and financial crises.
At Powerline, however, they note that the economic picture wasn’t so grim when Bill Clinton was campaigning on his economic record against Bob Dole:
Do you remember 1996, when Bill Clinton swept to an easy re-election victory over Bob Dole, on the basis of what pretty much everyone in the press considered a near-perfect economy? No “pink slip nation” in 1996!
Actually, though, the unemployment rate in November 1996, when Clinton rode a soaring economy to victory, was 5.4%. That’s right--three tenths of a percent higher than the “grim picture” of a “pink slip nation” painted by this month’s unemployment report.
I guess what is and is not “grim” hinges entirely on the party affiliation of the President.












