Liberals are trying to hide Obama's lousy winter GDP in a broader story about historical first quarter economic weakness.
A classic red herring maneuver designed to obscure the uniqueness of GDP weakness under Obama.
First it was CNBC here with "The Mysterious Case of Weak 1Q GDP, for 30 years!", and now it's The New York Times here with "Why You Can't Put Faith in Reports of First-Quarter Economic Slumps".
Consider these new pre-emptive first strikes designed to take the confidence out of opponents' sails when expected awful 1Q2015 GDP comes out next week. The weather argument used in the past is not going to fly this year simply because overall this last winter was pretty average, so another argument is being proposed which couches Obama's repeated first quarter failures in a broader context of perennially suspect first quarter GDP reports.
Oh look! Over there! A deer!
You wouldn't know from either of these stories that economic weakness in the first quarter under Obama has been uniquely weak. It doesn't matter if there is something seasonally different about the first quarter in general. What matters is that Obama can't even hit that.
Outside of recession Obama has had five first quarters with average nominal GDP change from the fourth quarter to the first of just 0.60%.
Forget the articles' fascination with the previous 30-year record. The 50 year record outside of recession going back to the years since 1946 shows that before Obama the average nominal GDP improvement from 4Q to 1Q was 2.3%.
Obama is underperforming that by 74%. His record is a complete outlier in the series, even compared to George W. Bush, who before Obama otherwise had the worst GDP record overall in the post-war. Bush's six first quarters outside of recession averaged 1.5%, 150% better than Obama. Add in the recession years and Bush still averaged 1.2%, 100% better than Obama in winter.
To make matters worse, five of the six quarters of Bush doing 150% better than Obama occurred in the warmer half of years in the 50 year series, when GDP naturally has run behind the GDP of the colder half of years. Include all eight first quarters for Bush when he did 100% better than Obama and seven of eight were in the warmer half of years when it's harder to post higher GDP, and the one was on the borderline of those warmer years. Obama by contrast in 2014 had the tenth coldest winter on record since 1946. That was actually an advantage to him for GDP because GDP in the colder half of winters has actually run 19% ahead of the warmer half. Instead Obama blamed his poor performance in 2014 on what was really to his advantage.
Barack Obama's poor winter GDP record sticks out like a sore thumb, and no amount of excuse-making can change that fact.
