In a source-greasing passage from his New York Times Magazine article yesterday on “The Final Days of the Presidency of George W. Bush”, Peter Baker states that “[f]or years” Bush “got no credit for a long-running economic recovery”:

[T]here are no valedictory days for Bush. For years, he got no credit for a long-running economic recovery, in part because of popular anger over Iraq. Now, it seems, he gets no credit for the improvements in Iraq because of deep discontent over the tattered economy. Housing and energy crises have only deepened public disaffection.

Presumably Baker isn’t actually familiar with the data on the recovery or he would know that the reason that Bush “got no credit for a long-running economic recovery” is that it did not improve the living standards of most Americans. Here’s what the Times itself wrote a few days ago in an article on a new Census report

Mr. Bernstein, from the Economic Policy Institute, agreed and said that while comparisons to 2006 showed some improvement, in order to understand the difficulties facing middle- and low-income families, it was important to consider these results in the context of the economic expansion since 2000.

For the first time on record, real household income is no higher at the end of an economic expansion than it was when the cycle began, Mr. Bernstein said.

The median income of working-age households — with household heads under age 65 — rose insignificantly in 2007, when adjusted for inflation, and was $2,010 below its 2000 level.

When the median income of working-age households declines during a recovery, you don’t get much credit. Shouldn’t Baker know this?