Wealth & Money Quote by Cliff Stearns

The line does what Washington talking points are built to do: turn a messy lived economy into a tidy scorecard, then declare victory. By invoking the “misery index” Cliff Stearns isn’t just citing a statistic; he’s smuggling in a moral frame. Misery becomes measurable, legible, and therefore governable. Add inflation to unemployment, get one number, and you can wave it like a report card. It’s political compression: complex anxieties flattened into an arithmetic sum.

The comparison “even going back to Jimmy Carter” is the real payload. Carter functions here as a bipartisan shorthand for economic malaise, a rhetorical basement. Stearns is telling listeners: the bad old days are behind us, and if you remember them, you should feel grateful. It also lets him skip the harder question of distribution. Low inflation and low unemployment can coexist with stagnant wages, precarious work, and uneven gains; the misery index doesn’t capture who’s actually miserable. The subtext is: don’t overthink it, the numbers are on our side, therefore the story is, too.

Context matters because this is defense-by-benchmarking. In moments when an administration faces broader critiques (war costs, deficits, corporate scandals, regional downturns), economic aggregates become a shield. Stearns’ intent is less to persuade skeptics with nuance than to give allies a clean line: the “Bush administration is doing a good job” because a chosen metric says so. That’s not analysis; it’s narrative discipline.