As the latest Bush recession heads into its second dip, it’s washing away one of the oldest truisms in American politics.
When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, conventional wisdom about our political parties was clear: Democrats stuck up for working people and minorities, but you couldn’t trust them with your money. For that, you wanted a Republican. This reached a head in the late ’70s, as Jimmy Carter faced runaway inflation, oil shocks and unemployment, and couldn’t seem to make headway against them. Reagan’s election brought a recession, a tax cut and a deepening federal deficit — but one way or another he got credit in the national mythology for dispelling the Carter malaise and putting the economy right.
Since Reagan, though, a new pattern has emerged, not just in the reality of the economy’s numbers but in the shorthand of the popular mind. Bush I: Recession. Clinton: Economic growth. Bush II: Recession.
Circumstance and luck play a huge part in all this, to be sure. But patterns like these are what build popular myths. If Bush doesn’t begin improving the fumbling performance of his economic team, or break free of his “tax cut or die” ideology, he could inherit a cruel variation on James Carville’s mantra from the 1992 election — as “It’s the economy, stupid” gets transformed in the popular mind to “It’s stupid’s economy.”
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.