Democrats need to stop ingesting the Right's propaganda
Donald Trump is fabulously adept at taking credit for and exaggerating every bit of good news, especially good economic news. When the news is bad, he changes the subject.
Trump is the master, but Republicans generally are skilled at fine-tailoring reality for their benefit.
Democrats are the opposite. They seem to assume that the public automatically sees the good things happening when they're in charge. Like psychologically abused children, they internalize almost any criticism. That's why rather than retell the story in the most flattering light, they dive into a defensive crouch. The inability to blast through the negative makes much of the public think them blameworthy.
We are now in the ninth year of a global economic expansion. For all but one year of it, Barack Obama was president. "Global" means that many countries are doing well. Some, meanwhile, are doing better than the United States. It's not Trump's economy.
The stock market has indeed posted lovely gains since Trump came into office. From his inauguration to Jan. 5, the day after the Dow Jones industrial average broke through 25,000, the market rose 26 percent. In the same period of Obama's first term, however, the Dow gained 33 percent. (And Obama saw no need to trash the environment to make polluters richer.)
Did you hear Democrats loudly heralding Obama's economic genius? Neither did I.
Since 1980, the biggest gain in the Dow during an eight-year presidency was 227 percent under Bill Clinton. The second-biggest was 149 percent under Obama. Coming in third was Ronald Reagan's, at 135 percent. But to whom does American lore give the biggest plaudits for robust markets? Reagan.
Many factors other than the president influence the economy (and stock prices), but that's not the point here. The point is that the flamboyant right-leaning media send out an 800-piece brass band every time a record is set or something goes well for two consecutive months when the president is a Republican.
You barely heard a peep from Obama when the Dow hit all-time highs during his presidency — and that happened 122 times. That may have reflected admirable modesty on Obama's part, but as politics, it was close to malpractice.
After passage of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats running for re-election let rightwing attacks and misinformation about the program rule their campaigns. Rather than tout the achievement as the best new protection for Americans in decades — and make the headline the many millions who would enjoy health coverage for the first time — they vowed over and over again to "fix" the
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