CNN — (CNN) — Politics typically comes with plenty of spin.
Even something seemingly unyielding or absolute like a number can get squished and twisted like putty.
As such, flashy economic data points extolled by candidates always come with plenty of asterisks, caveats and “yes, buts.”
In this election cycle, those qualifiers have multiplied in part due to quirks in the numbers themselves: A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and a once-in-a-generation inflation event sent shockwaves through the economy, distorting data and presidential economic records in the process.
“Interpreting economic data is like interpreting a Monet painting in the best of times,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told CNN in an interview. “But in these times, it’s a Monet painting with the Picasso overlaid on top of it. Very difficult to interpret.”
During Thursday night’s…
