No matter what the reason, if the Democrats fail to win the White House this year they should be sued for political malpractice. They say people vote their pocketbooks but these days a lot of folks can’t afford pocketbooks:
U.S. stocks tumbled, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its worst June since the Great Depression, as record oil prices, credit-market writedowns and a slowing economy threatened to extend a yearlong profit slump.
General Motors Corp., the largest U.S. automaker, plunged the most in three years as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. advised selling the stock and crude rose by $5 a barrel. Citigroup Inc. led the KBW Bank Index to an almost 10-year low as Goldman said the lender may report an $8.9 billion second-quarter charge and cut its dividend. Research In Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry, posted its biggest drop since 2001 on concern competition with Apple Inc.’s iPhone is reducing earnings.
The sound you may soon hear will be Republican presumptive Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain distancing himself fromt he White House.
And it gets worse:
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index plunged 38.82, or 2.9 percent, to 1,283.15, its biggest drop in three weeks. The Dow decreased 358.41, or 3 percent, to 11,453.42, its lowest since September 2006. The Nasdaq Composite Index sank 79.89, or 3.3 percent, to 2,321.37, its worst loss since January. Almost nine stocks fell for each that rose on the New York Stock Exchange.
“Most investors are going to sit on the sidelines until they’re more certain the sharks have left the waters and it’s safe to go back in,” said Bruce McCain, the Cleveland-based head of investment strategy at Key Private Bank, which oversees about $30 billion. “The write-offs have been far worse than anyone would have imagined.”
In 2004 GWB juggled things around to blame signs of a souring economy on….you guessed it. Bill Clinton. They called it the “Clinton recession” and Business Week reported:
No one should be surprised when economic or budget forecasts coming out of Washington are influenced by politics, especially during an election year. But when economic history is rewritten — with political consequences — that’s going too far.
President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, chaired by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, is trying to get away with exactly such revisionist history. The CEA’s Economic Report of the President, released Feb. 9, unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush’s re-election bid.
Instead of using the accepted start date of March 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 — a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush administration to term it the “Clinton Recession.” In a subsequent press conference, Mankiw said that the CEA had looked at the available data and “made the call.”
This simple statement masks an attack on one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality. For almost 75 years, the start and end dates of recessions have been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private non-partisan research group based in Cambridge, Mass.
But now calling what’s going on a “Clinton recession” won’t cut it anymore. It can be blamed on world oil prices. And maybe one day it’ll be blamed on the Democratic Congress.
Yet, if that happens, it appears doomed to flop because voters are overwhelmingly assigning responsibility to the White House. According to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, 75 percent blame Bush for the economy’s melt down:
Three out of four Americans, including large numbers of Republicans, blame President Bush’s economic policies for making the country worse off during the last eight years, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released Wednesday, reflecting a sharp increase in public pessimism during the last year.
Nine percent of respondents said the country’s economic condition had improved since Bush became president, compared with 75% who said conditions had worsened. Among Republicans, 42% said the country was worse off, while 26% said it was about the same, and 22% thought economic conditions had improved.
Each new news cycle brings a new horror story. It seems highly likely that come November there will be a lot of Big Broom voters who feel it’s pointless to have the same crew in power. Republican presumptive nominee Sen. John McCain will have a lot of distancing to do if he wants to win the White House — even though his base contains the 22 percent of the Republicans who feel Bush has helpful in getting the economy where it is today.
Seventy-five percent of Americans will agree to at least part of that…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.