Boy, I hope Republicans and conservatives don’t take that line on the economy. Yes, it is true that on the cited measures we are not doing that poorly. It is true as well that people are used to better numbers on unemployment and inflation than prevailed from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s. But they are not wrong to judge the economy by the standards we have shown the contemporary economy can meet, and they are surely not wrong to pay attention to the direction in which those indicators are going.