During the election cycle of 1992, George Bush the elder lost his job after Bill Clinton hammered him relentlessly for having caused the “worst economy of the last 50 years.”
In fact, as CNN’s Brooke Jackson has reported: “Three days before Christmas 1992, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally issued its official proclamation that the recession had ended 21 months earlier. What became the longest boom in U.S. history actually began nearly two years before Clinton took office.”
This last sentence is particularly telling, since public perception is that Clinton inherited a bad economy and saved it by raising taxes during his first term – something thatI don’t believe is ever possible.
Clinton spin doctors have created the impression that he had a stellar economic record during his own presidency, in spite of the fact that the economy was already starting to decline during the last year of his term after the stock market crashed in March 2000.
According to a report by MSNBC: “The longest economic expansion in U.S. history faltered so much in the summer of 2000 that business output actually contracted for one quarter, the government said Wednesday in releasing a comprehensive revision of the gross domestic product. Based on new data, the Commerce Department said that the GDP — the country’s total output of goods and services — shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000.”
I seem to remember how the MSM changed their tune on the economy just a day or two after Clinton was first elected. Not inaugurated, elected! They knew the economy was much better than they were reporting and had to start making corrections as soon as Bush 41 was defeated. I would have loved to watch them squirm if Bush had been reelected. I'm sure they would have done everything in their power to crash the economy in order to cover-up their collusion.