I agree with Russ and many of the commenters who point out how silly it is to judge the relative economic merits of the Democrats and the GOP by measuring what happened economically when the White House was occupied by Democrats and comparing to what happened when Republicans had the run of the place.
Pondering this issue raises a question in my mind: has anyone studied the economic consequences of partisan bickering? That is, I propose the following empirical study: use as the dependent variable some composite measure of economic performance, and use as the independent variable of interest some measure of partisan bickering.
A reasonable hypothesis is that economic performance improves — perhaps with a lag — as partisan bickering (or, more specifically, real and honest-to-goodness gridlock) increases.
Surely such a study has been done.
