David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press (3/1/09):

The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That's $2.3 trillion.  Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people--what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric.  It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.

The Dow is not a measure about what "people" think about government policies. It's a measure of what the tiny, elite group of people who trade stocks think stocks are worth, which is to say what they think other people would pay for them. These evaluations have little to do with the long-term health of the economy. In some cases, a declining stock market might be good news for the economy, particularly if stock prices have been unrealistically inflated.

If you want to find out what people in general actually think about President Obama's economic policies, a better way to do so is to ask a statistically representative sample of them. Such efforts generally provide much more positive results than the Dow Jones "metric."

Someone whose feelings you can predict based on what the Dow does, though, is Gregory's NBC colleague Chris Matthews. When stocks go down, Chris Matthews gets mad. Here he is a couple of weeks ago (Hardball, 2/23/09):

I want to ask you when we get back, how does he deal with the fact that he has a scorecard now. It's called the Dow Jones. Every day now--first of all, they're going to nationalize the banks. Then they're not going to nationalize the banks. No matter what they say, the Dow keeps going down. It's down to almost 7,000 now. I used to think 8,000 was the floor. It's heading toward 6,000! People are really getting angry! I'm getting angry!

People have saved money, who are facing retirement, are ripped right now. It's absolutely disturbing, to put it lightly, what this must be saying to people who are retired now. They have a nest egg, a 401(k) that's now a 101(k). They are ripped. I'm only saying it the nice way. They are really angry and they're going to get mad at him if we don't get this market turned around.

We'll be right back with Howard Fineman and see how the president does with his scorecard, and Gene Robinson, can he deal with that Dow Jones scorecard every day in decline?

If you're pulling down a multi-million salary like Chris Matthews, you probably invest quite a bit of it and therefore you might have a lot to lose when the stock market goes down. Your personal losses don't turn the Dow Jones into a "scorecard" for the president, however.

David Gregory sticking up for bank stockholders on Meet the Press (2/22/09):

There's a larger point here, which is, first of all, the more...the shares of...these banks gets talked down...the closer you get to wiping out the shareholder completely. And it's, it's not clear to me that everybody understands that the investor in this country, who is not just a fat cat, the investor is us.... It is the taxpayer, it's the teacher, it's someone who's invested in a 401(k). The investors on the sidelines, scared to death about taking any risk. And unless that changes, this economy really can't turn around.

Matthew Yglesias writes today (2/23/09) on the oddity of Gregory making a distinction between fat cats and people like himself. I can't find a published estimate of Gregory's salary, but his NBC colleague Chris Matthews reportedly makes $5 million a year (Washington Post, 1/8/09), as did his Meet the Press predecessor Tim Russert (Washington Post, 5/23/04), so Gregory's salary is probably in that neighborhood, give or take a few million. This is a hundred times the median family income in the U.S.--not counting Gregory's spouse's income; she used to be a vice president at Fannie Mae, making an estimated $3 million a year.

On Gregory's actual point: Only about a third of stocks are owned in the U.S. by the wealthiest 1 percent, so it's true that not all stockholders are actually "fat cats."  But almost 90 percent of stocks are owned by the top 20 percent of households, so when you're talking about policies that benefit stockholders, you're talking about benefiting a distinct minority.

The affliction that causes national political commentators to project their own perceptions onto the public-- let's call it Pundit Projection Syndrome--is affecting David Gregory's ability to come to grips with the fact that the public just wasn't as into John McCain's and Sarah Palin's debate performances as he was. Last night on his MSNBC show, Race for the White House With David Gregory (10/6/08), the anchor demonstrated his confusion in a discussion with liberal-leaning pundit Laurence O'Donnell:

GREGORY: Yes. Lawrence, let me show you another number here, which pertains to the debates in particular. Which ticket is doing better in these debates, Obama/Biden 50 percent, McCain/Palin 29 percent. What surprises me about that is that I think both of these debates have highlighted pretty strong performances by both McCain and Palin. You can argue who won on points, certainly. But in both of those debates, they were strong performances. This polling doesn't bear that out at all.

Luckily, O'Donnell was able to talk Gregory down by injecting some needed reality:

There's no polling that bears that out, David. The polling we had that night from CBS and from CNN all indicated that Biden had a very big win, like giant margins over Sarah Palin, and that Obama, to all of our surprise, had a very significant win over McCain on the foreign policy debate, which was supposed to be the McCain winning debate issue.