Presidents who are able to effectively work with Congress are the ones who end up overseeing the nation’s best economies and those that don’t can end up serving just one term, Bob Deitrick co-author of the new book “Bulls, Bears, and the Ballot Box – How the Performance of Our Presidents Has Impacted Your Wallet,” tells Newsmax.TV.
Deitrick’s observation comes at a time when Congress and President Barack Obama are often at loggerheads over key economic issues such as the deficit, government spending, and taxes.
Deitrick, who is also co-owner of Polaris Financial Partners, said that the book looked at the makeup of Congress during each president’s term from Hoover through George W. Bush and found that the “presidents who were able to work effectively with their Congress were the ones that had the best economic results for the country.”
Watch the exclusive interview here.
“And, in fact, those three presidents who did not work effectively with their own Congress, including Hoover, George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, all, coincidentally, were one-term presidents too.”
Deitrick found that in the last 80 years the United States economy has performed better under Democratic presidents than Republicans. He added that Democrats have “a very solid record when it comes to economic performance” but that Republicans are better salesmen.”
“The Republicans are great at salesmanship,” he said. “I mean, I will give it to them hands down. When it comes to winning the salesmanship merit badge, they won it every single year. On the other hand, the Democrats are very poor at conveying their own economic message and we state that in our book very candidly in one of the last chapters. But the reality is it’s not true.
“The Democrats have actually been better stewards of our economy on most data points if you look at the last 80 years. The reason why we looked at the last 80 years was because in that 80-year cycle, from ’29 through 2009, the Democrats have been in the White House 40 and the Republicans have been in the White House 40 years and we thought that was a perfect time to really take a look at how each party had performed for all of us.”
Deitrick, along with his co-author Lew Goldfarb, also examined the role of luck in economic success for any given president and concluded it was not a factor.
“We think you create your own luck through having good policies and through implementing good policies and through being a leader,” he said. “Ronald Reagan, you know, I don’t think he was lucky. It happened to be that the desktop computer came out in his tenure as well in the early to mid-‘80s and that changed the way that we conducted business or have conducted business for the prior 50 years. But, at the end of the day, presidents create their own luck through being strong leaders.”
While President Obama doesn’t play much of a role in the book he does make an appearance in the last chapter and Deitrick and Goldfarb have written Op-Eds on Obama.
“Of course, when we wrote the book last summer, we were two and a half years into the Obama tenure but, actually, I wrote an op-ed comparing Reagan’s first three and a half years to Barack Obama’s first three and a half years using the same 12 data points that we have used in our book and, surprisingly, Barack Obama actually beats Reagan in his first term, not his second term, but his first term on eight of those 12 data points,” he said.
“People forget that Ronald Reagan really struggled in his first term, He had a tough first term too. It wasn’t until he passed TEFRA (the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act) in the late summer of 1982 that things really began to turn around for him. Unemployment was actually above 10 percent for almost a year in his first term. It peaked at 10.8 percent for two months in the latter part of 1982. It was as high as 9.5 percent one year before the election in September of 1983 and it fell to 7.4 by November of ’84 and he won, obviously, by a landslide. But people forget that Ronald Reagan really struggled in his first term as Obama has.”
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