Bush, his GOPs and his media friends must think Americans are stupid!
Bush defended his performance Thursday, pointing to an improved economy despite higher prices for gasoline, heating oil and natural gas. He said the November elections would be about "peace and prosperity."
"We've got a record, and a good one," he said. "That's what I intend to campaign on and explain to people why I made the decisions I made, and why they're necessary to protect the American people, and why they've been necessary to keep this economy strong -- and why the policies we've got will keep this economy strong in the future."
But, the truth is "Economic news adds to Bush's woes!
http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/eco...8319475229.html
January 28, 2006 - 9:45AM
A surprisingly tepid report on the US economy brought new perils to President George W. Bush as he prepared to unveil his 2006 agenda and struggled to help vulnerable Republicans in a congressional election year.
The meager 1.1 percent gain in US fourth-quarter gross domestic product, reported by the Commerce Department, threatened to undercut Bush's argument his tax-cutting policies had set the stage for a thriving economy.
The GDP growth was the weakest in three years and marked an abrupt slowdown from the third quarter's 4.1 percent pace.
"If the first quarter is weak as well, this could pose some problems for Republicans," said Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. "There's a lot of latent unhappiness out there."
"The Republicans, because they have unified control of the White House and Congress, are the ones the public would blame," Mayer said.
Bush's approval rating stood at 43 percent in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken last Friday to Monday. His approval ratings, which are also in the mid-40s in several other recent polls, have steadied from two months ago, when they dipped into the high 30s.
But Republicans, facing midterm elections in November, have been anxious about both the spillover effect from Bush's poll numbers and about surveys showing voter dissatisfaction with the party generally.
The GDP report landed just days before Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday evening in which he plans to lay out proposals to rein in health care costs and to extend his tax cuts.
WEAK AUTO GIANTS
Bush also hoped in the speech to add momentum to an all-out White House campaign to talk up the economy and dispel pessimism created by headlines about high energy costs and layoffs at auto industry giants General Motors and Ford.
Administration officials rushed to play down the latest GDP number, with Treasury Secretary John Snow and White House economic adviser Al Hubbard hitting the airwaves to insist the expansion was solid, job growth was strong and businesses were healthy.
"By virtue of every index of economic performance, we're going the right way," Treasury Secretary John Snow told a Vermont talk radio show.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan emphasized that growth for all of 2005 was a brisk 3.5 percent.
Democrats seized on the GDP report to blast the White House for pushing tax cuts they say have ushered in high deficits while failing to do enough to help poor and middle-class Americans.
Gene Sperling, a former economic aide to President Bill Clinton, accused the Bush economic team of trying over the past few months to "create a selective and exaggerated picture of the economy" to justify the tax cuts.
Carroll Doherty, an analyst with the Pew Research Center, said the irony was that the main concern of the Bush administration up until now had been calling attention to upbeat figures on payroll growth and jobs the public had largely been ignoring.
"The difficulty for Bush is that there is already a good deal of pessimism out there," Doherty said.
Mayer noted that blows to the economy from Hurricane Katrina and higher energy costs could mean the GDP figure was little more than "blip" whose impact would be short-lived.
So far, he said, "We are not talking about a recession."
Check also:
http://today.reuters.com/investing/finance...-33_N27128769:1