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THE WHITE HOUSE regularly bemoans the fact that the economy is humming along impressively but the public doesn't recognize it. Just last week, President Bush told NBC News anchor Brian Williams that he's "a little bit" frustrated by the public's negative attitude. "I also think it's important to understand why people don't see or don't feel the improved economy," Bush said. But he didn't offer an explanation.
In truth, there are two explanations. One is the media, which dwells on bad economic news at the expense of good. As gasoline prices soared past $3.00 a gallon, the press couldn't say enough about this ugly trend. More recently as prices plummeted, the media was far less interested in touting the dramatic reversal.
The second explanation involves the Bush administration itself. Al Hubbard, the head of the White House's national economic council, conceded in a session with reporters this week that the administration hadn't spread the word effectively about the strong economy. He said it's "so easy in the White House to get caught up" in daily events and "forget about the importance of communications." Indeed, the administration has done an inadequate job of trumpeting dramatic economic gains in 2005 and earlier.
How do we know the media has poisoned the public's view of the economy? It's really very simple. Opinion polls show basically that people believe overwhelming that they're doing well financially but the country isn't. And they know for sure their own economic condition. They experience it personally on a daily basis. On the
other hand, what they know about the broader national economy comes largely from the media.
And this leads to a sharp dichotomy in the public's take on the economy. In a Gallup poll, 85 percent of Americans expressed satisfaction with the ways things are going in their own lives. But in another Gallup survey, 50 percent said they believe the economy will worsen, not stay the same or get better. And by a roughly two-to-one margin--64 percent to 33 percent in a new AP survey--Americans have consistently agreed that the country is headed in the wrong direction. The wrong track number isn't an exact proxy for negative feelings about the economy, but it is at least a partial reflection.
Now, what about the administration? The problem is chiefly that it has emphasized the macro and not the micro. While the macro economic numbers--overall economic growth, the jobless rate, and so on--are astonishingly favorable, I'm afraid the average citizen doesn't identify with those figures. And Democrats insist it's the micro numbers that are important: how individuals and households are faring. Naturally, Democrats argue that these show average Americans aren't doing well in the pocketbooks.
President Bush came to the Rose Garden on December 2 to tout good economic news and he instantly fell into the macro trap. Here's what he said:
"Our economy added 215,000 jobs for the month of November. We've added nearly 4.5 million new jobs in the last two-and-a-half years. Third-quarter growth of this year was 4.3 percent. That's in spite of the fact that we had hurricanes and high gasoline prices. The unemployment rate is 5 percent. And that's lower than the average for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s."
