-Republicans actually do better with small donations than Democrats do (far better, in fact).

-There really wasn’t much of Democratic primary in 2000 when Gore was the presumptive nominee pretty much from the word "go".

-And Dukakis was made fun of well before Bush donned a flight suit.

The era of "Reagan economic failure" is a persistant urban myth.

A Case Study in Liberal Bias

L. Brent Bozell III
Founder and President, Media Research Center
Vol. 23, No. 11, November 1994

In the 1980s, there was a consensus among the members of the national media that Ronald Reagan was going to fail and that he was going to bring on economic disaster. But. . .the economy didn’t collapse. In fact, it soared to unprecedented levels.

The media stubbornly refused to admit that “Reaganomics” was responsible. The drumbeat of negative opposition to the president’s policies continued through the 1980s. By 1986. . . the ratio of negative to positive stories was seven to one. In other words, as the economy was improving, media reports on the economy were becoming increasingly negative.

One of the most common allegations in these reports was that the poor got poorer under Reagan, even though the actual number of poor declined from 14 to 13 percent during his administration, and the average income for the lowest one-fifth of Americans rose from $7,008 to $9,431.

Inflation declined 48%, from 8.9 to 4.6%. Unemployment declined 45%, from 7.5 to 5.2.%. Interest rates declined 71.9%, from 21 to 5.9%. Twenty-one million new jobs were created. The so-called “greedy ’80s” witnessed the largest peacetime economic expansion in our nation’s history, yet the media remained deaf, dumb and blind.

source: Hillsdale College "Imprimis" Dec. 2002 issue

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Kate

All true. Unemployment did soar to freakishly high levels for a short time during the shake-out period and recession, but the recovery was well underway long before the 1984 election.

You know, tax cuts and freeing up capital and all that jazz...

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