CT Blue

We adjourned our Charter Revision Commission early enough to allow for members to watch the State of the Union. I’m no masochist, so I won’t be tuning in. In fact, I’ll soon be turning in, because I’m dead tired.

But I did want to point out this very interesting phenomenon, which Dean Baker points out at the American Prospect.

The New York Times reports this morning:

Mr. Bush has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents. Yet much to the consternation of his political advisers, he has had trouble getting credit for it, in large part because Americans were consumed by the war in Iraq.

There’s a similar lead in an article in the Day, which was culled from the Washington Post:

For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation’s strong economic performance because of public discontent over the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.

Apparently, the strong economic performance is proven by the fact that Bush and his handlers say there has been strong economic performance. The facts (in the form of average annual GDP growth), to which we reality based folks still cling, seem to state otherwise:

President Bush’s growth record is better than his father’s, but it is worse than the record of every other president in the last half century. It’s not clear why [other presidents] would be envious. It is also not clear what his political advisers have to complain about.

Yet complain they do, and in the fact free zone that is our mainstream media, that’s good enough. If they say economic growth has been strong under Bush, why look at the facts. After all, would Bush or his handlers lie to us?

Addendum: the other premise of these quotes is wrong too. Bush is not getting credit for the “improvement in Iraq” because 1) the surge has not succeeded on the terms on which it was sold, and 2) everyone suspects, and rightly so, that the situation will go south again soon.