On the eve of the new year, let’s take a quick look at how the economy “tanked” during 2014.

What? Oh, you mean it didn’t? Darn! I must have forgotten about that recent Department of Commerce report that showed the Gross Domestic Product grew at an annual rate of 5 percent for the latest quarter.

OK, I guess that means that the Obama economic policies, those frightening elements that would send the U.S. economy into a tailspin just didn’t do what Republican doomsayers said they would.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-economic-facts-get-in-the-way/2014/12/29/c82d7686-8f9c-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html

As the columnist Eugene Robinson wonders in the Washington Post, what in the world are GOP presidential candidates going to campaign on in 2016?

Those darn monthly jobs numbers keep piling up at a rate of a couple hundred thousand jobs a month. Oh, the deficit? It’s down … by about half of what it was annually when Barack Obama took office.

Gasoline prices? They’re down too. Now, the president isn’t able to take credit for the rapid decline in fuel prices, but he sure got the blame from the GOP presidential field in 2012 when they were increasing. Do you remember?

And yes, Wall Street seems happy. The Dow Jones Industrial Index is at 18,000, up more than double where it was in January 2009, when that “socialist” Obama took office. As Robinson noted in his column: “This is terrific for Wall Street and the 1 percenters, but it also fattens the pension funds and retirement accounts of the middle class.”

Uh, hello? Count me as one of those “middle class” Americans who’s happy with the status of his retirement account.

“For years, a central tenet of the Republican argument has been that on economic issues, Obama is either incompetent or a socialist,” Robinson writes. “It should have been clear from the beginning that he is neither, given that he rescued an economy on the brink of tipping into depression — and in a way that was friendly to Wall Street’s interests. But the GOP rarely lets the facts get in the way of a good story, so attacks on Obama’s economic stewardship have persisted.

And they’ll really get cranked up right along with the 2016 campaign.