This Sounds Familiar

Brad DeLong's blog points to an article by Matthew Yglesias:

[Gordon Brown] is... being punished for an economic crisis he didn’t cause, couldn’t have stopped, and has actually handled quite well. The global financial meltdown was not unique to Britain.... And thanks to... Brown... kept the UK out of the Euro... presided over substantial stimulus the British economy is actually weathering the recession pretty well.... Conditions aren’t great--they’re actually quite bad--but the situation is much better than what you see in other European countries....

[The] FT, in the course of endorsing David Cameron, concedes that “As a crisis manager, Gordon Brown has been a better premier than his critics claim” and simply doesn’t say anything about the substance of the Tories’ opposition to stimulus, a policy that had it been adopted would have sank the economy.

The Economist does take this issue head-on and concludes that the Tories “were wrong to oppose the economic stimulus after the banking crash” but endorses them anyway....

Britain confronted a giant economic challenge and the center-right party responded with such bad policies that even center-right business-focused newspapers think they were wrong, but... [urge] voters are urged to vote Tory anyway...

This sure reminds me of how the right wing press in the US is putting up a drumbeat against Obama, but Obama is the politician who is trying to fix the problems that the Republicans under Bush created. But the media is selling the people on the Republicans as a "cure" for the disease created by the Republicans. You would think the electorate is smarter than that, but maybe not.