Remember how a crowd of sycophants would emerge to cheer the Dear Leader and remind us all of how good we really had it whenever we had a positive jobs report under the Obama administration, ignoring stagnant median pay, shifting sectors of work, precariousness, and the uneven geography of job growth?
Oh. I guess they're still going to do that. 
This is what bothers me about economics. It makes pretensions of being the most rigorous of the social sciences, yet it is so intertwined with partisan politics that people refuse to recognize what is happening as long as they can spin the numbers.
Economists aren't the only people who take serious interest in economics, though. Politicians look for the numbers they want, and this effect feeds back into academia. You could be perfectly intellectually honest as an economist, but if your work is convenient to either party then you can expect to get nice funding grants to do it. This creates a certain selection effect for what gets promoted in terms of research; an effect that is not healthy for the discipline as a whole.
