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By Dennis ByrneChicago Tribune
Thank God it's over.
No, I don't mean the longest presidential campaign ever, although I'm glad it's done. Even though some commentator Tuesday night, as soon as the votes are counted, will be the first to kick off the next campaign by proclaiming that so-and-so now is "well-positioned" for a run in 2012.
Instead, I'm talking about how we no longer will have to be instructed that we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. That has been political hogwash, slopped on us by Barack Obama and the Democrats. If Obama wins Tuesday, the Great One no longer will need to scare us with that economic boogeyman and the positive news will start flowing. However, if John McCain wins (which we are assured he won't), look for Democrats and their media parrots to thwack his "failed economic policies" for our miseries, oh, woe is us, for another four years. Just as they blamed President George W. Bush's "failed economic policies," even though the same policies pulled us out of a bad recession that he didn't cause. Even though their president, Bill Clinton, was the first to push for the relaxation of mortgage loan requirements that led to the current wreck of a housing market. Truth is, we're not in the worst economic times since the Great Depression, when, at its peak, one out of four Americans was unemployed. Unemployment now, running about 6 percent, rose to more than 7 percent several times between the Depression and now, hit 9 percent in the mid-1970s and hovered a little less than 11 percent for some of the 1980s.
Yet, not letting facts stand in the way, Obama repeatedly deployed the Great Depression fabrication, which, in fact, added to our economic woes by eroding consumer confidence, stock market and housing values and credit availability. The collapse of the dot-com bubble and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks produced a recession that lasted 22 months (the Bush tax cuts helped pull us out of it). A recession in the early 1990s, brought on by a restrictive monetary policy, declining consumer sales, the insolvency of the government-backed fund guaranteeing savings-and-loan deposits and other factors still being argued, lasted 23 months. Those were nothing compared to the lengthy 1980s recession that featured 14 percent mortgage interest rates and lengthy gasoline lines. We had earlier recessions, even in the supposedly booming 1950s, but I guess those don't count either.
Sadly, many of my media colleagues have been struck by amnesia as they failed to report how we have gone through harder times, mindlessly repeating the Obama assertion as if it were a given. Keep it up long enough, and it will be a given, which is why I'm kind of hoping that Obama is elected so that it just might staunch the unremitting flow of predicted bad news.
Ever since Bush took office, we've had a ceaseless barrage of "we're-in-for-it-nows" from Democrats and liberal media. They have relentlessly repeated the r-word, even in good times, and soon enough, like a self-fulfilling prophecy and to Democratic good cheer, we got an economic slowdown. If you keep saying we're in a recession long enough, sooner or later, because of the economy's cyclical nature, you can claim that you're right, hurray, even though we still have not officially entered one.
Since I'm rash enough to challenge Obama's economic inventions, I'll go even further and suggest that the "recession" might well be over even before it started, or soon thereafter. The most recent gross domestic product numbers didn't tank as badly as the oracles predicted. Skyrocketing crude oil prices ("It's Bush's fault"), once considered the prime cause of our miseries, have plummeted. Funny how energy prices, when they are high, "ricochet like a deadly bullet through the economy," but when they nose-dive, it doesn't matter. Now, we're told, housing is really the problem. Except for the fact that housing sales, according to the data, have turned positive in the last month. But that, I gather, doesn't matter either because now it's tight credit that matters. Even though the credit markets have begun to loosen.
Not until Obama steps into the Oval Office will any of this be taken as a positive sign, and then guess who will get the credit for bringing us our newly discovered prosperity?
