In discussing the state of the economy this morning on Fox News Sunday, conservative commentator Bill Kristol noted that the stock market has performed reasonably well over the last several months. “The market’s up 35 percent in the last two months, which is pretty amazing,” Kristol said. He then noted that those Republicans — including himself — who were “chortling” about the stock market’s significant decline just after President Obama’s inauguration would now be forced to admit that they were wrong:
"Republicans who were chortling over that 20 percent drop in the stock market the first month or two of
administration are going to be, fairly enough, hoist on our own petard by the fact that now Obama’s getting this big stock market rally. … I — no one should base anything on this forecast — but in my view the short term is surprisingly bullish, but medium-long term very worrisome."
Indeed, a key talking point of the right-wing in late 2008 and the early part of 2009 was that the significant decline in the stock market was evidence that Obama’s approach to economic recovery was already failing. Kristol himself penned a column in the Weekly Standard entitled “Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Obama gives the markets the back of his hand.” In it, Kristol argued that Obama’s failure to base his entire economic agenda on ensuring day-to-day gains in the markets on Wall Street demonstrated he had already failed at governing:
"So the stock market drops over 25 percent since Election Day, almost 20 percent since Inauguration — and Barack Obama tells the American people at his press conference Tuesday not to “spend all your time worrying about that.” <...>
The stock market is about real money, about the real livelihoods of real. … I’m told almost every theme in Obama’s speech last Tuesday night was focus-group tested–and the speech played pretty well politically. But the markets weren’t impressed. Isn’t it time for Obama and his team to get up the nerve to stop playing politics and to govern?"
Kristol, of course, was not alone in making this argument. Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Republicans in Congress all got on board. The question now is whether or not Kristol’s conservative brethren will follow his lead and issue a correction.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/10/kristol-stock-market/
So what has Kristol been right about?
"The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
Is that about it?
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