Over at TNR’s The Plank, Noam Scheiber quotes from a Fred Barnes article:

One issue that needs to be developed is the economy, according to Blunt. “People take a strong economy for granted. We have to show that this didn’t just happen,” but is the result of Republican policies like tax cuts. Republican candidates will argue that if Democratic policies had been followed, a strong economic recovery would not have occurred. And job creation–243,000 in February–would have been weaker.

Scheiber’s response is to belittle upper income tax cuts as a costly and inefficient economic stimulus:

Barnes–sorry, Blunt–argues that the job number proves the superiority of an economic policy based almost entirely on cutting taxes. As far as I can tell, though, the only thing it proves is that if you’re president and you’re determined to goose the economy for a few years, you can probably do it.

But has Bush really goosed the economy? The evidence we have indicates that this is one of the weakest recoveries of the post-World War II era — here’s Edmund Andrews from the New York Times in January:

Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little – and so long delayed – effect.

So why is this some great political issue for Republicans?

In addition, Blunt is claiming the recovery would have been worse if Democratic economic policies had been followed, but that’s just an assertion. As Andrews documents, it’s hard to imagine doing much worse than the current administration. Moreover, the historical evidence indicates that Republican presidents have been less successful at creating jobs than Democrats — Princeton’s Larry Bartels finds that unemployment has been thirty percent lower under Democratic presidents since World War II (PDF).

Scheiber argues credibly that job losses under Bush were largely attributable to structural changes in the US economy. That’s fair enough. But why should we give Republicans credit for a lousy recovery?