Dissing the 90s

Talking about economics here, not the cruddy music that the generation spawned.

I never thought I'd live to offer such a hearty "Amen" to a Krugman thought, but sentiments like this make it easy for me:

Mr. Obama: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration."

There are, indeed, towns where the mill closed during the 1980s and nothing has replaced it. But the suggestion that the American heartland suffered equally during the Clinton and Bush years is deeply misleading.

In fact, the Clinton years were very good for working Americans in the Midwest, where real median household income soared before crashing after 2000. (You can see the numbers at my blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)

We can argue about how much credit Bill Clinton deserves for that boom. But if I were a Democratic Party elder, I'd urge Mr. Obama to stop blurring the distinction between Clinton-era prosperity and Bush-era economic distress.

If November rolls around and I'm in no mood to cast my vote for Obama, you can go ahead and mark this as one of the key reasons for not doing so.

ADD-ON: Left Coaster's Eripostle has a pretty thorough documentation on the 'Middle Finger of Hope'. Several of them go beyond the mere dissing of the 90s and I don't necessarily hold all of them as a terminal case against Obama's campaign. But the grand sum of the ones that come close is pretty aggravating.