It’s kind of sad, really. The Bush White House, which once promised to usher in an “era of responsibility,” goes to great lengths to place blame on just about everyone for Bush’s mistakes. At the top of the list, of course, is the Republicans’ catch-all for the nation’s ills: Bill Clinton.
The latest in the too-terribly-long saga of blaming Bill for Bush’s foibles is determining the exact timing of when the recession took place. This is a ridiculous debate, but one the White House seems to believe is terribly important.
Bush has been playing fast-and-loose with the calendar for a long while, but for a recent example, consider his infamous Meet the Press interview. “The recession started upon my arrival,” Bush said. “It could have been, some say, February, some say March, some speculate maybe earlier it started, but nevertheless it happened as we showed up here.”
There really isn’t that much mystery to it, but more on that in a moment.
The “controversy,” such as it is, is picking up again because the “Economic Report of the President,” issued last week, put the “start of the recession” in the fourth quarter of 2000. And we all know who was president in 2000.
This is all terribly silly for two reasons. One, the White House is lying about objective, easy-to-quantify numbers. Two, they really don’t need to.
As a factual matter, did the economy go into a recession under Clinton? No. According to the Commerce Department, the economy grew in both the third quarter and the fourth quarter of 2000, by 0.6 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively. This certainly wasn’t a robust economy, but weak growth is not a recession.
More importantly, the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is widely relied upon in government and the private sector for dating the business cycle, has explained the recession started in March 2001, two months after Bush was inaugurated.
As Slate’s Daniel Gross explained,
According to NBER’s definition, the recession did not begin until after President Clinton left office. NBER’s most recent “recession dating procedure” says, “A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough.” In other words, a recession begins as soon as the economy starts shrinking. And according to NBER, the economy peaked and started shrinking in March 2001, two months after the Bush presidency began. “The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began in March.” So according to NBER, the most recent recession did not start during the Clinton administration.
The really funny thing about the White House doing its best to deny recent history is that administration officials aren’t even reading their own reports. As Brad DeLong noted yesterday, page 31 of the 2004 Economic Report of the President clearly states that “monthly GDP reached a high point in February 2001.”
So everyone can agree when the recession started, except White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who really wants reporters to believe it began in October 2000.
Which leads me to my other point: there’s simply no reason for the White House to lie about this.
No one, not even me, could reasonably pin all of the blame for the March 2001 recession on Bush. He’d barely been in office and he hadn’t implemented any policies that would have had a dramatic affect on the economy. From a political perspective, this is the best Bush could have hoped for — he can’t be held entirely responsible for a recession that happens at the beginning of a term and he gets to take credit when the economy shakes off the recession and starts to grow again.
Why continue to debate who was responsible for an economic slowdown that occurred three years ago? Unfortunately, it’s simple. Bush has to blame Clinton for 2001 because voters are blaming Bush for 2004.
In fact, this is an easy one for the Dems to spin: You want to blame Clinton for March 2001? Fine. What have you done since?
Indeed, the Bush White House has sworn up and down for three years that the president’s economic policies would create millions of jobs, boost trade, spur growth, and maintain a balanced budget. Time and again, Bush has been terribly wrong about the effects of his initiatives and has delivered on virtually none of these alleged “guarantees.”
If Bush really did inherit an awful economic climate in 2001, he’s had ample opportunity to turn things around. He hasn’t.
This senseless debate over a brief recession demonstrates that the president is intentionally missing the point. No one cares who’s to blame for March 2001, but everyone wants to know who should be held responsible for the mishandling of the economy ever since.