In many ways, the economy has not looked so good in a long time.
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.”
Gee, I wonder why that is?
The media almost never reports good economic news unless it’s qualified with some silly statement like “but the growth was slower than experts expected” or “jobless claims among Americans declined even as unemployment among red-haired longshoreman spiked.” Ok, maybe that last one is an exaggeration, but you get what I mean.
The idea that this economy is awful is one of the biggest media hoaxes perpetuated on the American people in...well...not that long given the CBS Memos controversy. But still, even as economic growth chugs along, unemployment stays low and America, generally, prospers there are people in this country going around griping about “the economy.” Mostly because whenever they pick up a newspaper or watch television news all they hear about our economy is negativity.
It’s pathetic. A true testament to just how slanted and pervasively biased the news media really is.