Posted on 11/29/2007 12:46:41 PM PST by Kaslin
"There seems to be a pattern here. It takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush."
So said presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., during a speech -- specifically on the economy -- before a crowd in Knoxville, Iowa. Okay, we understand campaign sloganeering -- purportedly funny lines and the like during the campaign season. But shouldn't the Associated Press, in reporting Clinton's line, provide the reader with a little information?
Let's look at what incoming President Bill Clinton "cleaned up" when he took over from President George H. W. Bush in late January 1993. Despite the relentless economic news by the traditional media, Clinton entered office with an economic recovery two years old. During Bush-41's last year in office -- 1992, the year voters elected Clinton -- the economy grew 3.2 percent. President Clinton's average economic growth during his eight years was 2.4 percent.
Now look at what incoming President George W. Bush faced. The economy peaked in September of 2000. Many economic indicators, such as industrial production, peaked in September 2000 -- Clinton's last full year in office -- and continued to slide through January 2001, when Bush took office. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a non-profit organization the government uses to determine economic cycles, states the recession began in March 2001, some six weeks after Bush took over. So when W entered the White House, he dealt with an economy entering a recession -- a recession that, according to the NBER, lasted until November 2001.
Sen. Clinton's quip elicited applause from her audience, but how many in the crowd knew about the economic conditions Clinton enjoyed when entering office, or the downturn W confronted when he did so? Small wonder that so many remain ignorant about this when the Associated Press, in covering Clinton's economic speech, provides no information.
Harvard, along with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, recently put out a study confirming the type of liberal bias in the media that denies information to consumers of news.
The study found that Democrats got more news coverage than Republicans -- 49 percent of the stories versus 31 percent. It also found the "tone" of the coverage for Democrats was more positive, 35 percent compared to 26 percent for Republicans. "In other words," the study says, "not only did the Republicans receive less coverage overall, the attention they did get tended to be more negative than that of Democrats. And in some specific media genres, the difference is particularly striking."
In 11 newspapers -- including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Wall Street Journal -- front-page stories about Democrats had a "clear, positive message" 59 percent of the time, and only 11 percent had a negative tone.
For the top Democratic candidates, the difference was even more striking: Barack Obama received coverage that was 70 percent positive and 9 percent negative, and Hillary Clinton's was 61 percent positive and 13 percent negative. On the other hand, only 26 percent of the stories on Republican candidates were positive and 40 percent negative.
Democratic candidates received 49 percent of television's evening network newscast stories, while Republicans got 28 percent. And 39.5 percent of the Democratic coverage had a positive tone, while 17.1 percent was negative. But for Republicans, only 18.6 percent of the network evening news coverage was positive and 37.2 percent negative.
But perhaps you didn't hear about the Harvard/Pew study. When it was released, only 20 news stories about the report could be found in a Nexis search, and most of those made no mention of the extreme levels of bias.
Back to the Associated Press coverage of Sen. Clinton's economic speech. The Associated Press could have and should have written something like this:
"While Clinton's quip elicited applause from her audience, the actual facts say something different. Her husband, President Clinton, inherited an economy that in its last full year averaged 3.2 percent growth. So, in reality, her husband inherited an economy in a recovery, not in a recession. Similarly, President George W. Bush inherited an economy that was, according the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the non-profit organization the government uses to determine economic cycles, heading toward a recession."
Okay, okay, wake me, I'm dreaming.
“Clean up” as in “steal all of the stuff in the White House”.
This is a joke right?
I love ammo. Bookmarking to send to the under 30 crowd.
Bush had to clean up all the pizza stains in the WH when he took office. Clinton’s verminn left it like a pigsty.
Why do you say that?
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One way or the other Clinton is always following Bush......
Other stains too.
LLS
Had the economy been as strong as it is now with a year to go before election 1992, the elder Bush would’ve won in a Reaganesque landslide.
The two economies aren’t comparable.
There is one thing Bubba didn’t have to contend with in 1992: The Internet. Everything she says is deconstructed within seconds after it leaves her lips. She cannot stand scrutiny in the old media. She cannot withstand scrutiny in the new.......
???
And people wonder why voters go for style over substance. Headline readers all, I guess.
The question is, who cleans up a bush after a Clinton?
Any economic boom falsely attributed to Slick was due to his being forced at times, to adhere to largly conservative principles.
If the Beast is elected she will find it impossible to match, let alone “clean up” (clean up what specifically, witch?) after the the robust economic growth ignited by the first term Bush tax-cuts.
Implementing any shade of socialism will “clean up” the economy in the same way that a projectile spew of vomit that missed the sink, cleans up the bathroom.
Hillary still wishes someone had “cleaned up” Monica’s blue dress.
...well if we learned anything from the first eight years of Clinton, they’re really good at changing the numbers and making it look like things are going better than they really are...
Right. After voters kicked Democrats out in 1994, Clinton realized the only way he could accomplish anything was to cooperate with Newt Gingrich and “Contract with America” reforms.
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