For obvious reasons, the president is trying to shift attention away from the war, which is a disaster. The Administration’s approach is to get people talking about the economy, which it thinks it can claim goods news: energy prices have come down a bit and about 215,000 jobs were added in November.

Well, I suppose everything is relative. As my friend Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says in The Wall Street Journal, “Nominal wages have grown at a 3.5 percent annual rate over the last quarter. This is up from just a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first half of the year. This suggests that workers are taking advantage of a tighter labor market to secure wage gains. Wages had lost considerable purchasing power over the last year and a half due to higher energy prices, but with gas prices plunging in the last month, and wage growth accelerating, workers may finally be poised to get a share of the gains from the recovery.”

But, remember, this is still a very bad economic recovery historically. The unemployment rate is still stuck, personal debt is still at an all-time high (you’ve probably read stories about shoppers holding their money a little bit tighter during the initial holiday shopping season) and I think the possibility of a steep decline in housing prices still is a dark cloud out there for 2006. And all this government data sometimes doesn’t tell you that the news may be good for some, and not so good for others. For example, for all the growth in new jobs, the unemployment rate for African Americans went up another 1.5 percentage points to reach 10.6. Lots of people are still hurting