President Bush proves 'em wrong!

He was right about The Surge and he is right about the economy.


President Bush is right; His critics are wrong (yet again!)
From Blogs For Victory:

President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.

About a month ago he told reporters, “We’re not in a recession, we’re in a slowdown.” At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the “R” word, Mr. Bush refused. And on Friday, after the most recent jobs report — which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months), and a historically low 5 percent unemployment rate (4.95 percent, to be precise) — the president told reporters: “This economy is going to come on. I’m confident it will.”

We’re in the midst of the most widely predicted and heralded recession in history. Problem is, so far it’s a non-recession recession. Score one for President Bush. In an election year, it could be a big one.

First-quarter GDP growth came in at 0.6 percent. It wasn’t the widely predicted decline, and economists expect that number to be revised up. GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was also up slightly, while the prior two quarters averaged over 4 percent growth.

My pal Jimmy Pethokoukis quotes Stanford professor Robert Hall, who heads the recession-dating committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research: “It seems unlikely that we would ever declare a peak-date when real GDP continued to rise.”

Interesting — isn’t it? — just how durable and resilient our low-tax, free-market, capitalist economy truly is. Hit by soaring food and energy prices, a bad housing downturn, and a Wall Street credit crunch, the economy continues to expand, albeit slowly.
Over the past 7+ years I’ve watched President Bush be relentlessly attacked - mostly on the left, but quite a bit on the right, too. These attacks have tended to an incredible cruelty - no slander has been too extreme for President Bush’s critics…he is hated, by those who hate him, with a white-hot passion which entirely unhinges reason. Through it all, though, President Bush has kept his temper, refused to lash back and - most importantly - gets proven right again and again. Some of the criticism of President Bush won’t be proved wrong until some years after he leaves office, but I do believe that the only thing which will mar President Bush’s record is Campaign Finance Reform…everything else is working just as advertised.

President Bush is the man who has never lied to us; who has always told us how hard things will be; who has always done the right thing no matter what the risk to his political prospects - he is the man we all say we’re always looking for in politics, and just as soon as we got him, half the country went nuts with hatred of the man…no surprise; the true and the good are always welcome in the abstract, despised in the concrete. We’re going to miss President Bush come January, no matter who wins in November - even if the new President does a wonderful job, I doubt much we’re going to get a man with President Bush’s precise mix of raw courage and common sense for quite some time.