Nasty Nan and her Dummies were in charge when the econ took a nosedive sooooooooooooooooo. It actually is the Dummies that are responsible.
better rethink this one Axelrod.
If you look back over the past three decades, there is a direct correlation between leading economic indicators and the party that controls the House of Representatives.
Everyone likes to focus on who occupied the Oval Office. But, the federal government can't spend much at all unless the House agrees. It's the way that the US Constitution was written.
There was an exception: the mini-recession that followed the double whammy of the dot-com crash and 9/11. That was really out of either party's control. And the decisions to prosecute the Afghan and Iraq wars were bi-partisan: you can't assign all the responsibility to only one party.
But, we recovered from that pretty quickly. At the end of 2006, unemployment was under 5% and the annual deficit was shrinking. Then, the Democrats took control of Congress and everything went to hell.
However, I don't know if the housing bubble would have popped so quickly in 2008. The Bush administration was trying to defuse it as early as 2006, but Democrats in key positions were stonewalling (even the minority party can block legislation, despite what Barney Frank wants you to think). If the Republicans were still in control in 2007, there might have been a possibility for a soft landing, rather than an uncontrolled crash.