The number that Washington has been waiting for is finally out — the Consumer Price Index came in lower than expected at 2.7 percent. One could almost hear the sigh of relief emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and deservedly so. It was definitely good news for the administration, along with the positive quarterly GDP numbers and rising wages, after a disappointing July jobs report.

For most presidents, unemployment, inflation and wages have always been the three most important gears in the American economic engine, each with the potential to strengthen their political power or play the spoiler in moving their issue agenda and their party forward.

It has been ever thus. In 1934, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt called unemployment “the greatest menace to our

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