Bush Can't Swim

Donald Luskin looks at the unsung economic boom and wonders why it doesn't get more press:

In this kind of political environment, it seems that everyone is blind to the amazing success story that is our economy. According to the latest polls, 30% of Americans believe we are in an economic recession right now. And among my clients, I can tell you that there aren't any of them who think we're in a real bull market.

Yet over the last six months the S&P 500 has returned about 12%. That's just six months, and it's a bigger return than stocks have had historically in the average full year.

Since the official end of the last recession, in November 2001, the S&P 500 is up 24%. Why isn't that a bull market?

Over the same period, real GDP has grown 15%. At the rate of economic growth we logged in the first quarter of this year, our country grows the equivalent of an entire Australia every year. Worried about high oil prices? At this rate our GDP growth in a single year is three times the value of the entire economy of Iran, oil, nukes and all.

4 million payroll jobs have been created since the recession bottom. The unemployment rate has fallen from 5.5% to 4.7%. Federal income tax receipts are at an all time high. Home ownership is at an all time high. Household net worth is at an all time high. Per capita disposable income is at an all time high.

Meanwhile, over at The Corner, John Podhoretz is wondering just what the polls mean:

...it seems like everything is hurting Bush. The fact that he is deriving no benefit whatsoever from an economy growing at a 5 percent rate with declining unemployment is surely a landmark in the history of public-opinion research. The polling so clearly out of whack with the stats that one of two things must be true. 1) The economic data — including a jump in personal income — are only numbers on a page and aren't having any positive impact on people. Or 2) the degree of discontent being measured is actually far less severe than the polling numbers suggest. People say the country "is on the wrong track" but they don't actually believe it, or act in accordance with that sentiment. If #1 is right, then the GOP will indeed reap the whirlwind this year and in 2008. But if, as seems more likely to me, #2 is right, then we're going to learn something very telling about the nature of political polling in a non-presidential-election year.

There seems to be some confusion here. If the numbers that Luskin and Podhoretz cite are correct, why isn't the President getting some cred? Is it possible that an economic boom can happen in such a way that people consider it just "numbers on a page"? Or, as Podhoretz suggests, are the polls being manipulated (i.e. worded) in such a way as to make it seem people are a lot unhappier than they really are?

Perhaps it really does boil down to the fact that, for a certain segment of the population, the President just can't seem to do anything right. As Luskin notes:

There was a story in the New York Times last week that says it all. When Bush was hosting Chinese president Hu Jintao in Washington, he took him for a cruise on the Potomac on the presidential yacht. Hu's hat blew off into the river -- and before the Secret Service could do anything about it, Bush jumped overboard to get it. But he didn't get wet! He landed on the surface of the Potomac, and actually walked on the water to get President Hu's hat.

The headline in the New York Times was: President Bush Can't Swim.