"President Bush's economic agenda is a clear win-win for American families and businesses defeating our critics' no-win pessimism . . ," Evans said in a statement.
The Kerry campaign noted that U.S. goods exports and business fixed investment both declined, after adjusting for inflation, from the first quarter of 2001, when Bush took office, through the second quarter of this year.
Alan Greenspan's "soft patch" might have been less soft thabn he let on earlier this year.
(Ray Lustig -- The Washington Post)
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"No amount of spin is going to change the fact that these new numbers confirm that George Bush has had one of the worst economic records of any U.S. president since Hoover in the Great Depression," Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer said in a prepared statement.
The Commerce Department bases its initial GDP estimates each quarter on incomplete economic data and then revises them over time as more information becomes available.
The latest report showed that, even with the upward revision, economic growth slowed to a 3.3 percent annual rate in the spring quarter, after adjusting for inflation and seasonal variations, from a 4.5 percent pace in the first three months of the year.
Consumer spending slowed significantly in the second quarter, growing at a 1.6 percent annual rate after rising at a 4.1 percent pace in the first quarter.
Households spent less on motor vehicles, clothing, shoes, gasoline and other energy products, and spent more on food, housing and medical care, the report showed.
Exports grew at a 7.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the same as they did in the previous quarter. But imports grew faster, at a 12.6 percent pace in the spring, up from 10.6 percent at the beginning of the year.
The economy is expanding at around a 3.5 percent annual rate in the quarter that ends today, according to many analysts' estimates.
Analysts will get a better sense of the economy's current strength today when the government releases figures on personal spending and income for August, and next week when it reports on September employment.
