A just-in-time recovery?

Mickey Kaus Columnist
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A just-in-time recovery? My colleague Alex Pappas reports:

Republican pollster Ed Goeas says the next thirty days are “going to be the most important thirty days of the framing” of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

“It takes six months of solid economic information for voters to come to the conclusion that we are in a positive growing economy,”

Hmm. Why do I think Goeas is using an outdated time frame–one that doesn’t take into account the changes in technology and culture that have given us the ability to  process information far more quickly, accompanied by ever shorter attention spans (a phenomenon first described to me by Bruce Feiler)?  One implication of the Feiler Faster Thesis is surely that it no longer takes Goeas’  six months for voters to conclude the economy is recovering (and to start forgetting the bad times when it wasn’t).  That’s 1984 thinking! …  I don’t know what the new number is. Four months? Three months? But whatever it is, it probably represents a major hidden strength of Obama’s campaign:  Maybe the number of new jobs doesn’t really have to pick up substantially in April’s statistics (out Friday), or even May’s,  or June’s, for voters to grok that a recovery is here.  It can happen over the summer. …

Mickey Kaus