We all know that US economy does better under Dem presidents by virtually any metric: employment, unemployment, GDP growth, stock market, deficit reduction, etc. Conservatives typically dismiss these facts by asserting that the president has no way to significantly influence the economy.
I had proposed many times that the presidential power of the bully pulpit is very much underappreciated. The common alternative explanation to Dem presidents' overwhelmingly superior economic performance -- that B causes A, that people elect democrats in tough times, which then get better as they always do -- simply doesn't square with the evidence, with the actual timeline of actual elections and recessions.
If you look at the list of recessions, from Great Depression onward, the election of republicans were frequently followed by a recession within 2 years:
- Eisenhower in 1953 (recession of 1953)
- Eisenhower in 1957 (recession of 1958)
- Nixon in 1969 (recession of 1969)
- Nixon in 1973 (recession of 1973)
- Reagan in 1981 (recession of 1981)
- Bush Sr in 1989 (recession of 1990)
- Bush Jr in 2001 (recession of 2001)
Note, not a single Dem president on that list!
But only THREE presidents were elected in mid-recession:
- JFK (recession of 1960)
- Reagan (recession of 1980)
- Obama (Great Recession)
As you can see, the pattern conreps frequently suggest -- that Dem presidents get elected in tough times, and thereby reap the praise when times get better on their own -- simply is not true. What IS true, however, is that when GOP presidents get elected, recessions routinely follow. Like, literally, ALMOST EVERY FREAKING TIME! The only full GOP presidential terms who escaped this fate were Reagan's and Bush Jr'srespective second terms (Ford didn't oversee a recession, but recession struck in the beginning of Nixon's 2nd term).
In contrast, not a single post-WWII Dem president saw a recession start within a year or two of their taking office, and only TWO Dem presidents oversaw the beginning of a recession under their watch at all:
- Truman (recession of 1948)
- Carter (recession of 1980)
So the real pattern is: Put a republican in WH, and recession will follow within 2 years. EVERY F@#KING TIME! (the only times it didn't, were two of the second terms). Put a Democrat in WH, and recession will NEVER follow within 2 years, and has only a small chance of manifesting during the given term at all.
Frankly, while the sample size is small (only 17 full presidential terms), the difference is so stark as to be impossible to ignore. So yes, if we were to face the evidence squarely, even though we can reasonably say that President has no overt influence on the economy (Fed controls monetary policy, and Congress controls fiscal policy), nevertheless POTUS possesses some mighty powerful -- yet unobvious -- levers of economic influence; the partisan difference in economic outcomes is simply too stark to ignore, and so it's incumbent upon us not to bury out heads in the sand, but to figure out what the unobvious lever is.
My suggested explanation is this: it's the bully pulpit, the power to set the topic of the national conversation. Opponents offer no plausible alternative, just retreat into aprioristic rationalism and ostrichlike denial.
From my blog