CNBC and Obama's other excuse makers in the media don't want you to focus on how unusually bad Obama's winter GDP has been.
The fact is nominal GDP over the 69 winters from 1947 has improved from 4Q to 1Q on average by 1.77%. That includes every recession year, and Obama's entire record to date which pulls down the average. Pulling Obama's record out lifts the average to 1.94%.
Obama's record over the 7 winters from 2009 has averaged just 0.24%.
Whatever may be said about the existence of methodological problems with BEA's seasonal adjustments and the lack of transparency involved with its raw data, the point is those problems have persisted over time and infect the whole record. They aren't new to the Obama era. What is new is how CNBC and The New York Times have offered up this red herring this spring since it became clear the 2015 winter was nowhere near as bad as the last one and couldn't be plausibly blamed for the 1Q2015 GDP disaster.
Traditionally the BEA is always involved in revising its reporting based on better information and methods. That's the whole point of the comprehensive revisions published every five years in the summer (one of which we just had in 2013) and of the annual revisions every summer. BEA's decision to revise the Obama record and going back only to 2012 in the upcoming summer 2015 annual revision looks as unusual as Obama's GDP record itself, and smacks of pure politics. If the BEA had any integrity it would follow its normal process.
It is a complete red herring to focus on those problems as if they can in any way excuse Obama's awful record.
The political hacks who never stopped telling you how bad the economy was under George W. Bush aren't telling you now that Bush's winter GDP averaged 1.15%, almost five times better than under Obama.
We should be so lucky to have George Bush's rotten economy today instead of Barack Obama's.
