An Inconvenient Truth
Gerard Baker articulated an inconvenient truth to Carly Fiorina. In effect, it is a fact that the economy does better under Democratic presidencies than under Republican presidencies. Carly responded with a rather nonsensical answer.
Gerard Baker: Ms. Fiorina, while you’ve all pointed out how weak the current recovery has been and how disappointing by any historical standards, in the general election, the Democrats will inevitably ask you and voters to compare the recent president’s jobs performance. Now, in seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?
Carly Fiorina: Well, first of all, I must say as I think about that question, I think about a woman I met the other day. I would guess she was 40 years old. She had several children. And she said to me, you know, Carly, I go to bed every night afraid for my children’s future. And that really struck me. This is America. A mother is going to bed afraid for her children’s future. And the reason she’s afraid for her children’s future is because we’ve had problems for a long time. Yes, problems have gotten much worse under Democrats. But the truth is, this government has been growing bigger and bigger, more corrupt, less effective, crushing the engine of economic growth for a very long time.
Carly Fiorina was never reined in to answer the question. She was simply allowed to continue. I wrote about this a few months ago. The following paragraphs from the study on this issue is probative.
While there is substantial variation in growth rates (from over 6 percent for Truman-2 to under 1 percent for Bush II-2), the D-R gap is apparent. Panel B tells the same story in a slightly different way, by organizing the data by presidencies rather than by terms (with both the eight Kennedy-Johnson years and the eight Nixon-Ford years grouped together, and the data on Truman extended back to 1947:Q2). It is clear at a glance that GDP growth rises when Democrats get elected and falls when Republicans do. There are no exceptions, although the Carter-to-Reagan transition is almost a dead heat (3.6% to 3.5%).
NBER recession dating gives an even more lopsided view of the D-R difference. Over the 256 quarters in these 16 terms, Republicans occupied the White House for 144 quarters, Democrats for only 112. But of the 49 quarters classified by the NBER as in recession, only eight came under Democrats versus 41 under Republicans. Thus, the U.S. economy was in recession for 1.1 quarters on average during each Democratic term, but for 4.6 quarters during each Republican term.
As the silly season gets ripe, remember to share this information with both your Republican and Democratic friends.