Carter created more jobs than G.W. Bush?

So this is the new spin that I found on some Progressive blogs: More jobs were created under Presidents that were Democrats than Republicans. (This is similar to the claim I heard during the 2008 Presidential election that stated that the stock market does better under Democratic presidents--a misleading argument that gets debunked nicely by Don Luskin.) And a Wall Street Journal blog entry is used with hefty legitimacy to prove their point. The problem with this argument is that 1) The Executive branch does not control the public purse, Congress does. For example, a Democrat president with a Republican majority in Congress can not take all the credit or blame for the performance of the economy. 2) In the case where an incoming president inherits a recession from the previous administration, the crude statistics will encumber the unlucky incoming president with low and even negative job creation. President George W. Bush inherited the pop of the dot-com bubble from Bill Clinton and then had to deal with the September 11 terrorist attacks which also hit the economy hard. His first 3 years or so in office were economic disasters not of his doing. Since liberals love telling that Obama inherited a bad economy from G.W. Bush wouldn’t it be consistent to blame some of the low job creation numbers of George W. Bush to Bill Clinton?

This whole propaganda campaign by liberals to attempt to forestall losses in the November elections is based on poor analysis and a crude reading of statistics. I’m not surprised.