Winning makes everything a little rosier

A post-election prediction: The next round of consumer-confidence numbers will show a healthy uptick. With their party shut out of power in Washington, Democrats have adamantly refused to say anything nice about the economy in recent years, even when the empirical data looked pretty decent. (Republicans were grudging during much of the Clinton administration.) A Gallup report last week alluded to “strong partisan differences in economic views that help to explain the dearth of positive economic ratings seen for much of the past six years.”