Remember January 2000? The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time high, to much celebration amongst the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, the fading haze from an illicit sex scandal in which a sitting President committed perjury and found himself impeached remained in the air. But the combined efforts of the Clinton Administration and mainstream media had successfully minimized that inconvenient ordeal as Kenneth Starr's partisan persecution of "private conduct."
After all, the decade's guiding mantra was "it's the economy, stupid!"
So long as the economy was running on all cylinders, nothing else really mattered. Terrorism was a distant irritant that didn't impact our lives, and politicians' character and personal conduct were a distraction from more important economic matters.
Accordingly, the 1990s economic advance was widely celebrated, whereas illicit sex scandals involving our nation's highest elected officials were dismissed as irrelevant to Americans' everyday lives.
Fast forward to October 4, 2006.
After surpassing its January 14, 2000 high on October 3, the Dow Jones Industrial Average subsequently added 123.27 more points on October 4 to close at 11,850.61.
One would expect great celebration of this achievement to lead the news, especially considering the severe body blows that our nation's economy has endured since that ignorantly blissful January 2000 – the tech bubble, 9/11, a war, oil prices rising to an all-time nominal high and international chaos.
One would be wrong.
Instead of loudly trumpeting this achievement, newspapers such as USA Today offered such subdued headlines as "Dow Climbs from Depths." Care to guess whether newspapers ran similarly flaccid headlines during the Clinton-era ascent? Remember "Dow 36,000?"
The USA Today's October 4, 2006 opening paragraph threw more wet blankets on the record: "the Dow Jones Industrial Average ... erases some, but not all, of the pain suffered by investors when stocks came crashing down after peaking in early 2000." The article continued its somber tone, quoting a portfolio manager as saying, "the record's biggest significance is psychological."
Notably, that article fails to observe that the Dow's decline commenced in January 2000, long before the party then holding the White House changed hands one year later. And no observation that the current bull market rests upon a much more solid foundation of record quarters of consecutive corporate profit, in contrast with January 2000's tech bubble.
For their part, the network news channels and other leading newspapers also focused this week on the illicit sex scandal involving former Congressman Mark Foley (ahem... take a guess as to his political affiliation) instead of trumpeting the astounding economic progress.
Incredibly, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi righteously demanded that Republican House leaders be "immediately questioned under oath" regarding Rep. Foley. No word yet on whether Ms. Pelosi would hold those Republican House leaders to the same standard of veracity that liberals allowed Bill Clinton while being questioned "under oath." Or whether Rep. Foley's behavior, like Clinton's, was merely a "private matter just about sex," and therefore irrelevant.
What happened between January 2000 and October 2006?
Call us cynical, but one suspects that the difference has more to do with the party holding the White House and Congress than some sort of tectonic change in morality. If anything, after all, society has become more coarsened in the previous six years. Think of such things as Janet Jackson's fashion malfunction, "Desperate Housewives" and "Jackass" during that span.
Furthermore, compare the fate of Republicans who find themselves mired in illicit sex scandals to the fate of Democrats in similar situations. Republican Senator Bob Packwood, and Republican Congressmen Mark Foley and Daniel Crane lost their respective positions. In contrast, Bill Clinton and Democratic Congressman Gerry Studds remained in office, championed by their supporters.
Thus, despite the fact that approximately 60% of Americans own stock, and are personally affected by the Dow Jones Industrial average, plummeting oil and gasoline prices, low unemployment, and steady economic growth, economic news takes a backseat to the Mark Foley scandal.
Hypocrisy, anyone?
October 5, 2006