In the case of the economist, it's pretty jarring to see a magazine normally full of facts and figures turn into a political hack job when it comes to covering US politics.
Bush comes into office with a balanced budget and a recession, passes a really big tax cut that brings us into deficits, they applaud. Passes an expensive an inefficient medicare expansion, they're silent.
Obama comes into office with a trillion dollar deficit and a near-depression on his hands, passes tax cuts and a stimulus bill while attacking healthcare costs, and he's "presiding over a spending problem". Nevermind that he's been cutting discretionary spending since 2010.
It's not that their biases don't align with mine -- it's that their biases are so transparently hacky that it destroys any credibility the rest of the magazine has.
Sure, there was a recession, which I alluded to, and other stuff, well, I was working with a few sentences, not a book.
The CBO graded obamacare as reducing medicare costs (the biggest driver of our budget deficits). Expanding coverage should have a positive impact on costs, too. But I agree that expanding coverage was at least as important the bill's authors.
I wasn't trying to oversimplify the situation more than is necessary for a few sentence summary -- and people could disagree with my characterization. The coverage towards each president from the Economist is enlightening though, especially when you divorce it from policy or compare their coverage of similar policies from both administrations. That's where the hackiness comes in.
