Where’s The Press Coverage?: The

08 Aug, 2002 by John Hawkins

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Where’s The Press Coverage?: The story Bob Novak just broke would be on the front page on every newspaper in America in today in three inch high letters…if a Republican were involved instead of a Democrat…

“The Commerce Department’s painful report last week that the national economy is worse than anticipated obscured the document’s startling revelation. Hidden in the morass of statistics, there is proof that the Clinton administration grossly overestimated the strength of the economy leading up to the 2000 election. Did the federal government join Enron and WorldCom in cooking the books?

Through all of President Bill Clinton’s last two years in office, the announced level of before-tax profits was at least 10 percent too high–a discrepancy rising close to 30 percent during the last presidential campaign. Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year, while in fact it was declining.”

Does this pass anyone’s “smell test”? The economy is almost always the biggest factor in a Presidential election and what do you know, some key numbers were off by not 10%, not 15%, not 20%, not 25%, but 30% in Gore’s favor when he was running for election. If it could be proven that the Clinton administration cooked the books that much to help Gore’s chances in the 2000 election it would be almost as big a scandal as Watergate.

I find it very interesting that a story that could potentially be this big isn’t even making the news when something like the ‘Bush – Enron scandal’ was on front pages across America for weeks. We still don’t even know what the charges were in that scandal but it must have been terribly serious because the words ‘Bush, Enron & scandal’ were mentioned endlessly.

Yet here we have some VERY FISHY government accounting that looks more suspicious than anything Arthur Andersen ever did, that occurred during an election year and that greatly helped the election chances of a man from the administration that was responsible for the numbers. So where’s Woodward and Bernstein? Why isn’t Dan Rather on the case? They should be humiliated that it was Bob Novak who broke this story. But this is an election year, and a couple of weeks worth of stories speculating about shady Clinton administration accounting wouldn’t help the party that almost all the mainstream press will be voting for. Keep that in mind when you’re looking for the reams of press this story should be receiving.