NYT Admits Economy Strong, Then Scratches Head At Why This Isn't Helping Bush

Hmmm.... what a puzzler.

(NYT link, but here's the main stuff.)

In many ways, the economy has not looked so good in a long time.

The price of gas at the pump has tumbled since midsummer. Unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in more than five years. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average has finally returned to its glory days of the late 1990’s, setting records almost daily.
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But Republican candidates do not seem to be getting any traction from the glowing economic statistics with midterm elections just two weeks away.

The economy is virtually nowhere to be found among the campaign ads of embattled Republican incumbents fighting to hold onto their House or Senate seats. Nor is it showing up as a strong weapon in the arsenal of Republican governors defending their jobs from Democrats.

“I don’t know of another election cycle in which the economy was so good, yet the election prospects for the incumbent party looked so bad,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist. “If something goes wrong, Republicans are to blame. If something goes right, Republicans don’t get credit.”

The only place that the economy has emerged as a major campaign theme has been in the aging industrial heartland around the Great Lakes, where the bleak economic prospects are being deployed against incumbents, Republicans and Democrats alike. But where the economic winds seem to be blowing their way, voters appear unwilling to hear that Republican policies made it so.

Disenchantment over the war in Iraq has morphed into disillusionment over the direction of the country, breeding distrust in the administration’s policies, surveys suggest. Moreover, concerned by weak wage growth, costly health care and eroding benefits, many middle-class voters do not see the economy improving for them.

“Voters overwhelmingly don’t approve of the president on the economy,” said Amy Walter, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan firm that handicaps political races. “It comes down to the issue of credibility. And so many voters feel so pessimistic about the direction of the country.”

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Of voters polled in the latest New York Times/CBS News national survey this month, 60 percent rated the economy as either good or very good, up from 56 percent in September.

I don't remember seeing that bit of polling given much attention.

It's all a boggle to me. It must be Iraq. Surely there is no other explanation possible to explain how the economy could be so good, and yet the public is misled into thinking it's awful.

posted by Ace at 02:45 PM

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