I’ve now seen folks on both sides of the aisle quibbling, chattering about when the clock starts for the ‘4 years ago’ question: early September 2008, a couple weeks before Lehman and the full jobs meltdown? or late January 2009, when most of the job losses and contraction had actually occurred and when President Obama took office. Obviously, each side has a reason for starting the clock in its favored position. But I think for any voter who is even remotely persuadable this is a literalism that misses the point. People get the point.
More broadly, trying to say that somehow things were still rocking couple weeks before the bottom officially fell out recalls that classic joke about the guy who falls out of a 50 story building and gets asked half way down “How’s it going?”
To which he answers, “So far, not bad!”
