Washington Memo: For Bush, a Chronicle of Bad News Foretold Normally, presidents are cheerleaders for the nation's economy. On Oct. 19, 1987, the day the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 508 points, or 22.6 percent, President Ronald Reagan said the historic fall was simply investors taking profits. The next day, he blamed Democrats in Congress. The day after that, Mr. Reagan proclaimed that the crisis "appears to be over." In 1991, when the economy was last in a recession, President George Bush told Congress in his State of the Union address that there were "reasons to be optimistic about our economy." He predicted, accurately, that "we will get on our way to a new record of expansion and achieve the competitive strength that will carry us into the next American century." For President Bill Clinton, touting the economy posed no problem, since he presided over a period of unremittingly good economic news. Now comes George W. Bush, who is presenting what an analysis in The Financial Times last week called "the novel spectacle" of a president "urging citizens to ignore good economic news and focus on the bad." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/politics/19MEMO.html?pagewanted=all