From The Washington Post, 7/1/03:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...0.html?referre
r=emailarticle

As 2004 Nears, Bush Pins Slump on Clinton

By Dana Milbank

Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page A11


With the start of his reelection campaign in the past two weeks,
President Bush has revived his pastime of blaming his predecessor,
Bill Clinton, for the economic recession.

"Two-and-a-half years ago, we inherited an economy in recession," he
told donors at a Bush-Cheney '04 reception yesterday in Miami.

He has raised the same accusation in fundraising appearances since
mid-June in Washington, Georgia, New York, Los Angeles and San
Francisco.

It's a good applause line for a crowd of red-meat political
supporters.

The trouble is it's a case of what the president has called, in
another context, revisionist history.

The recession officially began in March of 2001 -- two months after
Bush was sworn in -- according to the universally acknowledged arbiter
of such things, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And the president, at other times, has said so himself.

The bad news came on Nov. 26, 2001.

The NBER, led by an informal economic adviser to Bush, Martin
Feldstein, pronounced that economic activity peaked in March 2001, "a
determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in
March 2001 and a recession began."

At the time, Bush accepted the verdict with perfect accuracy.

"This week, the official announcement came that our economy has been
in recession since March," he said in his radio address the next
weekend.

"And unfortunately, to a lot of Americans, that news comes as no
surprise. Many have lost jobs or seen their hours cut. Many have seen
friends or family laid off. The long economic expansion that started
10 years ago, in 1991, began to slow last year. Many economists warned
me when I took office that a recession was beginning, so we took quick
action."

Until the NBER's official pronouncement, Bush had avoided the "R"
word.

He spoke earlier in 2001 of an "economic slowdown" as administration
officials noted, correctly, that the pace of economic growth began to
slow (but not contract) in 2000, under Clinton's watch.

"In terms of how you call it, what the numbers look like, we've got
statisticians who will be crunching the numbers and let us know
exactly where we stand," Bush said in October 2001.

"But we don't need numbers to tell us people are hurting."

Then, last summer, Bush revised his history of when the recession
began.

Beginning in August 2002, he began to say that "we did, in fact,
inherit an economic recession."

Addressing Republican governors in September, he declared:

"I want you all to remember that when Dick Cheney and I got sworn in,
the country was in a recession."

In May of this year, Bush even gave the recession an official starting
date three weeks before he took office, saying "our nation went into a
recession, starting January 1 of 2001."

The source of this revision apparently was a July 2002 report by
Bush's Commerce Department that the economy had contracted in the
first quarter of 2001 by 0.6 percent.

But that was a quarterly figure that gave no indication when in the
quarter the economy turned south.

Still, Bush used that to revise the NBER definition so that the
economy was in recession "the minute I got sworn in" on Jan. 20.

Feldstein's NBER, which earlier said it gives "relatively little
weight" to the quarterly growth figures from Commerce, is not joining
in the revision.

Two weeks ago, it issued an updated report sticking by its assessment
that the recession began in March 2001.