When Treasury Secretary John Snow told the Times of London ten days go that he expected interest rates to rise with a growing economy, I posted — Secretary Snow and Interest Rates — I intimated:

According to several reports, analysts are claiming a 7-percent growth rate for the 3rd quarter of this year. This is not a “Bush recession.” This is not a “sluggish economy.” (The growth rate for 1999 was 4.2-percent.)

The analysts were low by two tenths, as the Gross Domestic Product grew by 7.2-percent last quarter. This is the highest GDP rise since the first quarter of 1984.

President Reagan’s growth in the first quarter of 1984 was in the first quarter of election year. President Bush’s growth in the third quarter of 2003, is in the penultimate quarter before the election year. And this year, the “election year” politically began early.

In November of 1984, President Reagan was reelected 58.8% of the vote. None of the current crop of Dems resembles Walter Mondale — or Jimmy Carter, for that matter, and any such talk is nifty as far as it goes, but it doesn’t buy you beer.

So what have the Dems got? Well, it’s been a jobless recovery, but it is no longer shedding jobs. With this kind of growth in consumer spending and business investment, re-employment is just a matter of time.

The Dems can harp on Iraq and the war on terror — two issues on which they once thought the President to be untouchable — but that issue is not a winner for them.

President Bush is doing very well right now, and things can only keep improving. The mutants are doing their worst in Baghdad as we speak. I daresay there is not much more that they can do in a country occupied by the United States military.

We are fortunate that President Bush is able to remain, for the most part, above the small talk, the cheap and snide pundits, the pugnacious partisans, and the wannabe presidents. I suspect he responds only when his staff begs him to do so: “Mr. President, you can’t let them talk about you like this!”

After employment has revived, we’ve won the peace, and President Bush is comfortably reelected, I hope he expends his political capital on abolishing the Department of Education. And cutting taxes.