The Anchoress

None of the words are mine, but I thought they made a nice collection:

From ABC’s The Note (via K-Lo at The Corner:

If the Bush White House weren’t so completely distracted by the Wilson leak investigation, perhaps the President would be able to actually get something done — besides sign CAFTA, the highway bill, and the energy bill into law; read all the improving economic figures; celebrate his still-bullet-proof Supreme Court nomination; and continue along semi-stealthily on 2006 fundraising and candidate recruitment.

And if the Democrats weren’t so sure that a one-sentence party platform (”Karl Rove should be in jail.”) was a sure winner, perhaps they would Notice that the Republican majority is likely to get at least some credit with voters for passing these laws; that the Bill Clinton Democratic Party of free trade just might have been dead and buried shortly after midnight; and that the AFL thing — along with the America Coming Together thing, along with the DNC thing — leaves the party with some serious money and organization questions.

And/but there’s still the Iraq war and Social Security for the White House to deal with, but does anyone think Democrats are scoring political points galore on those?

And/but perhaps Democrats will be able to convince the country by votin’ time that Washington is a corrupt, Republican-dominated cesspool of special interest greed and that the macro economic numbers mean nothing. (Just like in 2002 an7d 2004. . .)

GDP and More (Jayson at Polipundit.

The Commerce Department just reported the U.S. economy grew at an inflation-adjusted rate of 3.4 percent last quarter.

Regarding inflation, in and of itself, the Department’s measuring stick currently reads 2.4 percent. To put that into perspective, back in 1978, when Mr. Haginy told me and my classmates to be worried about “global cooling,” inflation was running at an annualized rate of over 9.0 percent.

The economy has posted the following (annualized) real growth rates over the past thirty months:

3.4 - Q2 2005
3.8 - Q1 2005
3.8 - Q4 2004
4.0 - Q3 2004
3.3 - Q2 2004
4.5 - Q1 2004
4.2 - Q4 2003
7.4 - Q3 2003
4.1 - Q2 2003
1.9 - Q1 2003

On the other hand, if you surveyed a bunch of those 80 year-old lifelong Democrats – you know, the kind of people who hold the surreal distinction of having voted for Harry Truman, on the one hand, and John Kerry, on the other, and who get their economic *news* from the likes of “60 Minutes,” NPR, Lou Dobbs, the Philly Inquirer, and the Detroit Free Press – you’d learn many of them believe the country still is mired in a recession.

3.4 PERCENT GROWTH John Podhoretz: And if this quarter is like the last four, that number will be revised upward next month to around 3.8 percent. Which means the economy has grown at a rate of slightly less than 4 percent a year for the past two years. And they wonder why there’s a) low inflation b) low interest rates c) home appreciation and d) Americans who don’t know anything about macroeconomics not knowing that they’re living in a miraculously good economic period presided over by President Bush and the Republican Congress.

If the president had chosen to accentuate these positives earlier this year rather than try to impress on the American people that there is a “crisis” in Social Security, then the poliitical-insider impression of the damage done to Bush’s standing might be rather different.