Not Liberal, but Sick?

Barack Obama said Monday, "Mr. McCain, the economic disaster is happening right now, maybe you haven't noticed." Where are we economically? If the average voter believes he or she is suffering, that means something. But we are not in recession, unemployment isn’t unusually high at 5.7% (it averaged 5.8% in the 1990s), and the price of oil has fallen to where SUV sales are on the rise again.

It’s not a good time, and the stock market, a predictor of the near-term economic future, has dropped over the past two days to 800 points below “healthy” (Dow 12,000, S&P 1,300, NASDAQ 2,500) on my Fox Index. The picture, though, hardly justifies Obama’s use of the phrase “economic disaster.”

For Obama and Democrats, the real “disaster” will be an economy healthy enough to keep Barack out of the White House. Obama’s elite, liberal base isn’t large enough to elect a president. In general, the American masses and their elite are in two different camps. But liberals have the money, the intellectual firepower, and the media domination including of the entertainment industry needed to, in Lincoln’s words, “fool all of the people some of the time.” And Democrats can lay claim to being able fix an economy (through Keynesian pump-priming) wrecked by Republican mismanagement. So a sour economy is key to Obama’s victory, and so Obama will see bad economic news whether or not it is there.