Rick Anderson notes, as others have, the strong similarities between Barack Obama's buy-low advice and the comments that got Stephen Harper in so much trouble during last fall's campaign.
It's an entirely reasonable point, since what the two leaders said was virtually identical. But it's also reasonable to point out that the context of their remarks was rather different - different enough, in fact, that the criticism of Harper hasn't been as discredited as Rick and many others seem to think.
Whatever else you can criticize him for, you can't accuse Obama of failing to take seriously the recession and the hardship it's caused Americans. He's just introduced in the most ambitious budget in generations, largely as a response to it, and at times his rhetoric has if anything exaggerated the problem. When he suggests this might be a good time to buy stocks, he's not being glib - he's just trying to inject a bit of optimism amid all the doom and gloom.
Of course, by this point, you couldn't accuse Harper of downplaying the severity of the economic situation; quite the opposite. But when he was speaking to Peter Mansbridge lo those many months ago, it was quite a different story.
As is often the case when politicians' words get them in trouble, Harper's problem was that his "buy low" line epitomized something that he was being criticized for more broadly - in this case, downplaying the economic challenges ahead in order to assist his re-election prospects.
Obviously, nobody knew back then quite how dire the situation was. But there were enough signs that it was totally fair game to accuse Harper of irresponsible indifference. Remember, this was a PM who insisted against all odds that Canada would be largely unaffected by what was going on in the rest of the world - a PM who didn't bother even to release a serious policy platform, let alone one focused on addressing the economic downturn. Having been at his big economic address in Toronto, arguably the low point of his campaign, I can attest that criticism of him was far from misplaced.
In fairness, it wasn't just Harper. The Liberals, who screeched endlessly about the coming economic apolocalypse but didn't bother adjusting their platform - or the New Democrats, who joined every other party in insisting there wouldn't be a deficit - were little better. The whole campaign was fought in some kind of weird alternate reality. But if anything, what's happened since then should make us angrier about it - not be used to justify the PM's behaviour at the time.
(I should mention that unlike some of the other commentary on this subject, Rick's post mostly uses Harper's and Obama's comments as a jumping-off point for an entertaining rant about political media's failure to grasp economic fundamentals. It's well worth reading, even if the hook is debatable.)
