Our View: Perspective, and relativism

It doesn’t seem that long ago — it’s been 20 years actually — that liberals could look at 4.2 percent third-quarter growth (annualized at 3.4 percent) and deem it cataclysmic. But then again, there was a Bush in the White House.

That was then, of course. And this is now: The economy downright purred (at least in fevered left-leaning minds) at 2 percent growth this past quarter — good enough to elevate economic output for the year thus far to 1.7 percent.

As Mitt Romney has told us ad infinitum (and rightly so), that 1.7 figure is lower than last year at this time (1.8 percent), which was lower than the fall of 2010 (2.4 percent).

So, relatively speaking, the situation now is not even as good as it was two years ago. That hardly favors a sitting president.

But then, relativism is the stock-in-trade of liberals. Look for them over the next week, until Election Day, to sell us on the notion that the economy is moving. We, in the interim, will pine for those days in 1992, when 3.4 percent growth was considered catastrophic.