Batfink's Beep -- 05-05-06

How much longer will the press be able to shield the Democrats from the Bush economy?

May 5, 2006

It has long been supposed, and probably correctly, that a good economy can shield a president from practically any other political problem. Assuming body bags are not coming in daily by the dozens, there isn't much the opposition can do to hurt a president when economic times are flush. Take the last president, for example. Now, you could say that the MSM was in the bag for Clinton, and you'd be right. If word had come out that he molested gerbils, the press would surely have made sure we never heard about it. If he put on a rubber Frankenstein mask at night and ran around killing people with an ax, the same would doubtless be true. In a media-driven world, it's hard to fight a unified, biased press. That's why controlling the press is the first thing wannabe dictators have always done. And when the press goes along willingly, even enthusiastically, well...

But at the end of the day, even that wouldn't have worked had the market not been roaring, and the great silent masses happy enough when payday rolled around. That's the awful truth about us as a nation, and always has been -- for the most part, and with only the most extreme exceptions, we vote our pocketbooks.

That's why the Democrats, as well as the press, have put so much effort, even when they have the arguably bigger fish of a shooting war to fry, into knocking the Bush economy. When all is said and done, there is just NO silver bullet to use against a president like an apparently bad economy, and they know it. It works best, of course, when the economy really is bad, but when you control the press, it doesn't really have to be; a determined, stretching-over-several-years campaign to make believe an economy is bad can also work in a pinch. After all, as Lincoln said, you can fool most of the people most of the time, and after all, what is the point of a political party controlling the MSM if not to pull off propaganda coups of that sort?

And it has worked. There can be no denying it when, with 5.3 million jobs created in the last few years, even in the face of unprecedented terror attacks aimed at the heart of our economy, the stock market a mere hundred points or so from the all-time high of the dot-com bubble, and unemployment in the mid 4's, most Americans continue to fret and gripe about the 'poor economy'. It makes one wonder what a good economy would look like, and what would have happened if any past president had ever been held to whatever that standard is.

How ever all that may be, this is obviously a good thing for people to believe if one is a Democrat looking at an election in November. But how long can the charade be kept up? Or, more to the point, can it be kept up long enough? What would happen to Democrat prospects, even with a war effort that people wish were moving along quicker, if the actual state of the economy were to become widely understood?

Historically low, and probably still falling unemployment hasn't punctured the Democrat 'the economic sky is falling' story. Neither has the unprecedented housing boom, which, contrary to press bleatings, STILL shows no sign of tapering off. Low interest rates and falling manufacturer inventories hasn't, either. And so far, neither has the steadily rising stock market.

But a big benchmark is coming up.

At the peak of the afore-mentioned Clinton dot-com bubble, the Dow got just over 11,700. There was a lot of air in that figure in those days, a lot of money chasing the pie-in-the-sky dreams of innumerable start-ups with nothing more than a half-baked idea, some venture capital, and an IPO banker. That's why it didn't last. Sooner or later, the market clears away the people who are just burning other peoples' money along with daylight.

But now that inevitable clear-out is part of history. Low-tax-fueled steady growth over the Bush years has brought us back up to that formerly too-good-to-be-true level, and this time, it's for real. Soon, the financial pages will tell anyone who reads them that the Dow is at an all-time high. Not 'best since 9/11', not 'best in 5 years', best ever. And it already shows in the countless mutual fund statements of everyone who has a 401K account.

That will be awfully hard to hide. And it comes in plenty of time to ring in a long, happy summer of people feeling good about the way things are going for them financially.

The Democrat propagandists have had a pretty good run with their bad-economy fantasy over the last several years, to be sure. It has served them well, even if it never did do well enough to actually win them back any power the last few election cycles. But the truth may be finally catching up with them, and there's still several months to go before election day for it all to sink in. GOP stock is cheap at the moment, and there haven't been a lot of people willing to go all in on it lately. The Dems are actually getting giddy about their prospects for November. But if July and August bring all-time highs on Wall Street and the wide realization that we are indeed in a historic boom, and have been for 5 years, the out-party may just taste yet another heaping helping of the doom and gloom they've been selling.

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