DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it's very difficult to prove something like that, just like it's difficult for the president to prove the economy would've been weaker if not for his particular policies. How could it have been stronger had a Republican been in president, in your judgment? Been in the White House, I should say.

DANIELS: Well, for one thing, for one thing, national policy wouldn't have been so relentlessly anti-enterprise as it's been. If you'd assembled a team of Nobel economists and said design us a policy to stifle and strangle investments and small business growth and innovation in this economy, you couldn't have done better than what's happened the last three years. The mindless piling on of new regulations, every one of them very expensive, and in the aggregate extraordinarily so, that's all drained away dollars that could've been used to hire someone. New taxes and the threat of more, all the uncertainty that's come with that. What we know is this, David, I don't have--no one can prove what might have happened, but this is the weakest recovery, by far, from a deep recession that we have in--since the records have been kept, and I don't think that's an accident.

Wow--anti-enterprise tax-hiking regulatory excess!

Instead of the reporter in the room quizzing his guest on what he's talking about, let's get another guest to weigh in.

Like, say, a billionaire mayor:

GREGORY: Mayor Bloomberg, as an independent voice in all of this, is that your judgment as well, that that's a fair criticism?

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I think I agree with most of what Mitch said. I think if you want to have growth, number one, you have to have the financial industry be strong and willing to take risks. And this relentless criticism and investigation of them, whether--regardless of the facts in the past, if we want to have a future, we have to have people have confidence.

The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

Brooks' claim, then, is that inequality is really a matter of the top one-fifth, not the 1 percent. Well, that's not what the Congressional Budget Office (10/11) says.

It's true that what you might call the upper middle class has done better than the middle class and poor over the past three decades or so--their income has grown by 65 percent, vs. 40 percent for the middle class and only 18 percent for the poor. But over the same time period, the income of the richest 1 percent has soared--by 275 percent. That's close to quadrupling.

So while the share of income claimed by the upper middle class has stayed about the same since 1979, the poor and middle class have gotten substantially less while the piece of the pie taken by the 1 percent has more than doubled in size. As it turns out, the real driver of inequality and unfairness--is the financial elite who hog society resources.

Score one for Occupy Wall Street--zero for David Brooks.

Under the headline, "For GOP, Pipeline Is Central to Agenda," Steinhauer explains:

Republicans are framing Keystone as an urgent jobs and energy project at a time of high unemployment and creeping gasoline prices, and trying to portray Mr. Obama as giving in to hard-left environmentalists in an election year at the expense of addressing both.

Instead of challenging that narrative, the Times bolstered it, alluding to what Republican presidential candidates are saying about Keystone and quoting from Keystone-supporting Democrats.

"This week, Democrats moved to blunt the Keystone attacks," the Times went on--which merely set up more quotes from potentially Keystone-friendly Democrats like Senator Harry Reid, who wants the project to keep the oil in the U.S.

The Times then went back to Republican PR:

For Republicans, the pipeline is a political trifecta. It unites most of their party and divides the Democrats. It is also fairly easy to explain to voters, and it hits on the key concerns of many Americans: jobs, energy independence and fear of economic competition with China, which Republicans have said will be the recipient of the Canadian oil without the Keystone plan.

You can challenge that "trifecta," but the Times mostly passed on that option. The only hint of skepticism comes late in the article:

The number of jobs that could be created by the Keystone expansion--supporters say 20,000--is disputed. But many companies and labor unions around the country were counting on the expansion and had already made materials or hired workers to gear up.

The numbers are disputed. How so?

As we've talked about before, this is arguably the key issue here. An outside estimate from Cornell says 2,500-4,000 jobs. The State Department says 5 or 6 thousand.

It's not difficult to cite these numbers, or to ask Keystone proponents to explain where they're getting their much higher estimates (hint: from the company). This is especially important in a piece about how this issue will be an important part of the Republican presidential campaign strategy.

The Times notes near the end:

A wild card is whether workers invested in the project will serve as an echo chamber for the Republicans' criticism.

Today the  New York Times certainly served that function.

Of course not, you might say. But that's why you don't work in the media big leagues.

Here's NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory yesterday (1/29/12), speaking to Obama adviser David Axlerod:

But if you look at how dire the fiscal situation is in the country, we just came off a debt debacle this past summer. Alan Simpson, responding to the State of the Union, said: Where's the guts? Where's the hard stuff? Where's the beef? Where are the hard choices that Americans are going to have to make? What are Americans going to have to do with less of if this president gets re-elected?

Axelrod, to his credit, noted that plenty of people are actually hurting. But that didn't seem to impress Gregory:

GREGORY: But we're not dealing with the big drivers of the debt, as you know. The debt commission that the president convened is not advice that he acted on. And the reality is that the fiscal situation is dire. If we're not dealing with entitlements--what, you talk about shared sacrifice, would the president...

AXELROD: Listen, the...

GREGORY: Wait a second. He--there was a stimulus plan. There was a new healthcare entitlement, but there was nothing dealing with the big drivers of the day.

It's hard to overstate just how committed elite media are to the concept of government austerity as the fix to our current economic problems. Economists like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker might disagree, and the public would seem to think the "hard stuff" could be spending less on, say, the military. But that doesn't seem to register with people like David Gregory, who demand that politicians must be brave enough to cut Social Security--a program he's falsely declared to be one of the "big drivers" of the debt.