Democrats have a new narrative. Forced to acknowledge that the U.S. economy is finally roaring after President Donald Trump’s first year in office, they now claim the president is simply reaping the benefits of his predecessor’s enlightened policies.

Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer made the claim recently on a cable news program. He said Trump got a running start on the economy courtesy of Barack Obama. Hoyer accused Trump of making “some pretty glaring misrepresentations about why the economy is where it is” in his State of the Union Address.

We find this amusing. If one wants to discuss glaring misrepresentations about the reasons for the state of the economy, consider the shape-shifting Democratic explanations during the eight years of malaise under Obama.

Obama took office in the midst of the Great Recession. He blamed his predecessor for that economy, which was fair game.

But the Great Recession officially ended in June of Obama’s first year in office. What followed were seven and a half years of the most anemic economic recovery in the nation’s history, a period during which annual GDP growth never topped 2 percent.

Obama succeeded in continuing to blame Bush for the economy all the way through his 2012 re-election campaign. But as the dysphoria continued, Democrats were forced to come up with a new explanation. It came from Larry Summers, the liberal economist who headed Obama’s National Economic Council for a time.

Summers announced that 2 percent GDP growth is simply the new normal, the result of labor-saving technology and other economic changes that suppress wage growth among middle class Americans, thus slowing growth. The old normal of 3 percent-plus annual GDP growth would never again be achievable in the United States, he said.

That was a load, of course.

Evidence mounts with every passing day under Trump that it was Obama’s policies, fiercely defended to this day by Summers, that held the economy back.

Obama sent the regulatory regime into hyperdrive, setting records every year for the number of new burdens heaped on employers and lenders. He used clean air rules to bankrupt much of the coal industry. He signed legislation that strangled bank lending. He used the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a premise to freeze offshore drilling, only to see land-based frackers more than fill the gap.

The negative effect of these policies on growth is evident. The fact the economy took off when Trump reversed all of them during his first year (GDP growth averaged 3 percent in the last three quarters of 2017) is proof in the pudding.

This presents a political problem for Democrats and explains the new narrative. The Dems believe based on history and polling that they can make big gains in Congress in the November elections. But they face the difficult problem of explaining why it is Americans should prefer a return to the Obama economy versus what they have now.

Their solution is to say that what we have today is really Obama’s economy. It’s a nice try from an Orwellian perspective. But only a fool would buy it.