On Fox and Friends this morning, host Gretchen Carlson asked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) about Vice President Biden’s comment that the Obama administration “misread the economy” when they made predictions about the impact of the stimulus earlier this year. “Here goes Biden again and he says something that is really in this case true,” said Huckabee. “They didn’t realize how bad things were.”
Huckabee claimed that “there’s one thing though that Biden and President Obama have got to get under control. And that is quit blaming George Bush.” He then made the common conservative claim that Bush inherited a recession from Bill Clinton, but didn’t complain about it:
HUCKABEE: There’s one thing though that Biden and President Obama have got to get under control. And that is quit blaming George Bush. George Bush inherited an economy when he became president back in 2001 that was already beginning to show real signs of the stress from the breaking of the technology bubble. George Bush didn’t go out whining and complaining every day, he stood up like the president of the United States and he worked on trying to get it fixed.
Then 2001, 9/11 came, things really went tough, but he worked on the economy and it was in much better shape for most of his presidency. Then the recession started, wasn’t totally his fault for sure and all you hear from Joe Biden and President Obama is how, how terrible it was, what they inherited, how it wasn’t their fault. No, look, you own it now. You got elected, you wanted the job. Stand up and take it and get this thing rolling. But quit spending money.
Watch it:
As ThinkProgress has pointed out, it’s false to say that Bush and his colleagues refrained from “whining and complaining” about the economy they inherited. In fact, Bush complained about it right up until he left office:
“When I took office, our economy was beginning a recession.” — Bush, 8/7/02
“The president inherited a Clinton recession and turned it into the early stages of Bush prosperity.” — Secretary of Commerce Don Evans, 9/2/04
“In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession.” — Bush, 1/12/09
As Media Matters noted in their comprehensive report on the backdating of the 2001 recession, which actually began in March 2001 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bush OMB Director Mitch Daniels once used the inherited a recession talking point in three separate interviews on the same day.
Transcript:
HUCKABEE: There’s one thing though that Biden and President Obama have got to get under control. And that is quit blaming George Bush. George Bush inherited an economy when he became president back in 2001 that was already beginning to show real signs of the stress from the breaking of the technology bubble. George Bush didn’t go out whining and complaining every day, he stood up like the president of the United States and he worked on trying to get it fixed. Then 2001, 9/11 came, things really went tough, but he worked on the economy and it was in much better shape for most of his presidency. Then the recession started, wasn’t totally his fault for sure and all you hear from Joe Biden and President Obama is how, how terrible it was, what they inherited, how it wasn’t their fault. No, look, you own it now. You got elected, you wanted the job. Stand up and take it and get this thing rolling. But quit spending money.
Update:
Media Matters has an expanded list of Bush administration complaints about the economy it “inherited.”