BIll Clinton is taking some heat for saying, "it's always a mistake to bet against America...It was tough in 1992 and we wound up with the eight best years we've had in modern history." But this is actually a relatively modest, inarguable claim. The best comparison is how in almost every election year you hear that even the losing candidate got more votes than any other candidate in history. This makes it sound like they ran a better campaign, when what actually happened is they ran a normal campaign in a larger country. Population growth happens, America gets bigger, and candidates get more votes than their predecessors. Then they get a nice resume line like "received more votes than any candidate in history," even as it's not saying much. Similarly, 1995-2000 was a pretty great time for America. This was true, in part, because of roaring economic growth growth and the tech boom and the fall of the Soviet Union and relative global peace. But it was also true because America's had a growing economy for most of its history and almost every year is better than the year before it. We're richer, can buy more interesting stuff, cure more diseases, sample more types of cuisine, and all the rest. FDR might have been a better president than Bill Clinton, but the late-90s, which featured both the internet and cholesterol lowering medication, were quite a bit more pleasant than the early 40s. I guess the counterargument here is that there are certain moments of national purpose and triumph (like the immediate post-war period) that made American life better than a simple economic reading would suggest and certain moments (like the George W. Bush period) in which a mood of fear and insecurity and national disappointment rendered the moment less pleasant than the objective statistics would suggest. But fluctuations aside, the beauty of living in a rich, developed, and growing nation is that things keep getting better, and so every decade features some of our best years up till that point. The 90s happen to look particularly good right now because Bush is a big screw-up, but I have high hopes for 2011-15.
