US President George W. Bush has no shortage of words to describe the ailing economy.
He began this year warning of “the risk of a downturn” and a “period of uncertainty.” Time and again, Bush has said the nation is in “a rough patch.” He calls the current climate “a slowdown.” In the Rose Garden last week, he spoke somberly of “very difficult times, very difficult.”
But there is one word that Bush has not used: recession.
By avoiding the word “recession” when consumers are feeling squeezed and some economists think the nation is already in one, Bush is taking criticism for not telling it like it is. But Friday’s less-dismal-than-expected jobs numbers, coupled with Wednesday’s less-dismal-than-expected economic data, left him the wiggle room he needs to keep the word out of his lexicon a while longer.
“I know it’s tough times,” he said on Friday during a session with employees of a technology company in this city outside St. Louis, Missouri.
He called the unemployment report, which showed 20,000 jobs lost last month, “a sign that this economy is not as robust as any of us would like.”
No president wants to admit a recession on his watch, though Bush talks about the recession of 2001, mostly to suggest he inherited a bad hand from president Bill Clinton. And no president wants to create a self-fulfilling prophecy with downbeat chatter that might further shake consumer confidence.
Still, Bush walks a fine line as he reconciles the latest numbers with the pain many Americans feel.
“He’s in a very difficult position,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who specializes in political rhetoric. “He wants to reflect how Americans feel but at the same time not damage Republican hopes for the fall. If he acknowledges a recession he’ll have to take responsibility for it. But if he rejects a recession, he’ll look out of touch.”
The White House says there is no reason for Bush to talk about recession absent concrete proof the nation is in one, and it has been assertive about pushing back. When NBC News reported on Wednesday that first-quarter growth data showed the nation just short of a recession, Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary, sent a complaint to the anchor, Brian Williams.
“I e-mailed Brian and his producers and said, ‘No, you’re wrong,’” Fratto recalled.
Aboard Air Force One on the way to Missouri on Friday, Fratto dismissed talk of even a mild recession, saying the new jobs numbers were “not in recessionary territory.”
The comment drew a sharp rebuke from Representative Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, who ridiculed Bush and his advisers, saying they had not gotten the news that “this is a recession that is hurting more Americans every day.”
“Recession” is an emotionally freighted word, but it also has a technical meaning, and with Wall Street whispering another r-word — “rebound” — some economists say Bush is correct not to use “recession” just yet. Michael Darda, the chief economist at MKM Partners, a nonpartisan brokerage and research firm, said Friday’s numbers suggest “a sharp slowdown,” not quite a recession.
The official determination will come from the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent organization that tracks fluctuations in the business cycle. Luckily for Bush, the bureau works slowly — so slowly that there may be no official word until after he leaves office. The last recession ended in November 2001; the bureau declared it official in June 2003.
There is no hard and fast way to define a recession; the old rule of thumb — two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth — no longer applies. Instead, the bureau defines recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months,” and relies on a mix of economic indicators.
That leaves the White House free to choose its own words — a linguistic challenge that has bedeviled presidents past.
When a top adviser to former US president Jimmy Carter, Alfred Kahn, warned of a depression, Carter grew furious, and Kahn dropped the word from his vocabulary, substituting “banana.” (“We’re now in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years,” Time magazine quoted him saying in 1978.)
Carter himself is known for what many remember as his “malaise” speech (it was an aide who used the word, not Carter; but it stuck).
Bush’s father, former president George Bush, lost re-election in 1992 in part because his tone was out of sync with what Americans felt.
“He kept saying things have turned a corner, they’re looking up; and statistically he was right,” Luntz said. “But nobody believed him.”
The current Bush administration engaged in pessimistic economic talk early on, using it to make the case that tax cuts would spur growth. Even before taking office as vice president, Dick Cheney warned that the country could be “on the front edge of a recession.” In March 2001, Bush warned that the economy was “beginning to sputter.”
That turned out to be accurate; the economic research bureau dates March as the beginning of the 2001 recession.
But the remarks left Bush open to accusations of preying on anxieties to advance his tax agenda, said B. Dan Wood, a political scientist at Texas A&M University who has written a book on presidential economic rhetoric.
“In my view he lost credibility about the economy,” Wood said.
Bush began this year talking about the economy’s resilience, and its strong foundation, but as the picture has darkened, such talk often fell by the wayside.
Here on Friday, it was back, with Bush sounding far more chipper than just a few days ago in the Rose Garden, before the latest reports.
“I know it’s tough times and I know you’re having to pay more at the fuel pump than you want,” Bush said. “But this economy’s going to come on. I’m confident it will.”
Taiwan might just give up. That’s the argument Simon Shuster made in The Atlantic’s October issue. The US is unreliable, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leadership is aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Taiwan does not have the military capability to defend itself in a prolonged war without help. What hope does Taiwan have? Quite a bit more, in fact, than Shuster lets on. Shuster points to genuine problems. The first Donald Trump administration had a mostly positive record on Taiwan policy. It regularized the arms sales process, enhanced the military-to-military relationship, and treated Taiwan more like a normal
On Oct. 10, 1911, gunfire in Wuchang (武昌) shattered the stillness of late-Qing China. What began as a regional uprising quickly ignited a chain reaction across the empire, toppling a dynastic order that had endured for more than two millennia and ushering in one of Asia’s first republics — the Republic of China (ROC). From that moment, the 10th day of the 10th month became a date of epochal significance, not merely in Chinese history, but in the broader arc of Asia’s encounter with modernity. Yet today, as Taiwan marks Double Ten National Day, the holiday’s meaning has undergone a transformation
A Facebook post by Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) earlier this month achieved record levels of engagement — although perhaps inadvertently. In it, he attacked Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator and Taipei mayoral candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) for an op-ed published in 2014 discussing drug harm reduction policies. In attempting to stir up fear with talk of community centers, drugs and needles, Chiang’s comment section exploded. More than 100,000 comments poured in within the first two hours; more than 330,000 after the first 12; and more than 400,000 by noon the following day. Rather embarrassingly, many commenters made a point
Last year, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) turned the Double Ten National Day ceremony into a platform for grievances against the government. Yesterday, standing before the president and foreign dignitaries, he warned against Taiwan becoming a “false democracy, in reality a dictatorship.” Then he called for unity. Democratic leaders must tolerate criticism, even on ceremonial occasions, but Han misused his position and a national celebration to insinuate that Taiwan’s elected president was steering the country toward dictatorship and cast himself as a statesman offering reconciliation. Han asked how Taiwan’s security should be examined, using a medical analogy. If he insists on playing
RSS