A surging American economy, a story sidelined by the war, is likely to start impacting the political debate in the coming weeks, our Luiza Ch. Savage is reporting from Washington. Growth in jobs has been reported two months in a row at sharply higher than predicted numbers. Projections of the budget deficit are starting to fall. And tax receipts, both at local and national levels, are starting to move upward, as people go back to work and, importantly, take capital gains. It all looks encouraging for President Bush.

The Democrats don’t want to say this flat out. On Saturday, the New York Times ran out on its front page a dirge about how Mr. Bush’s ratings aren’t moving up despite the economy. Its editorial Sunday, “Talking Deficits,” warns that Mr. Bush is “likely to claim a victory, of sorts, over the budget deficit.” It reckons the good news is going to be based on October data from the Office of Management and Budget, owing to the likelihood that the deficit will be way under an earlier projection of $521 billion. The Times sets it down as a “bookkeeping triumph.”

It’s going to get harder to dismiss the kind of job growth Mr. Bush has been delivering as fiddling with the books. One of those originally warning of the jobless recovery, Rob’t. McTeer of the Dallas Federal Reserve, tells us that net job growth started coming in last August and has been what he calls “vigorous” since January.

He calls the recovery “stronger than people had expected it to be” and says, “though people haven’t really started feeling it yet, real GDP growth has been as strong since last year’s third quarter as it was during the height of the new economy period of the late ’90s.”

Only the Democrats can see a fall in taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product as some kind of scandal, as the Times editorial seeks to portray it. The fall in taxes as a percentage of GDP, however, will no doubt come to be understood as one of the reasons we are recording the surge in growth that we are seeing. And one of the jobs for Mr. Bush will be pressing this case and pressing it early and hard. For he no doubt remembers what happened to his father, who was defeated by President Clinton’s “It’s the Economy, Stupid” campaign at a time when the economy had been expanding for six consecutive quarters.

That was all part of the boom that had been ignited by President Reagan’s supply-side revolution. It was a boom that carried through the entire Clinton term, helped by Mr. Clinton’s own commitment to free trade and his willingness to defy class-warriors in his own party by signing both the welfare reform and the cut in the tax on capital gains that were passed by the Republican Congress.

In the context of the eruption of the world war, Mr. Bush has been both farsighted in recognizing the power of tax cuts on the margin — the principle Mr. Reagan taught — and courageous in putting them through. He is well positioned now to fight the Democrats on the tax issue as they press a rearguard campaign to prevent the tax cuts from becoming permanent.

The debate will no doubt get more shrill by the week. The Progressive Policy Institute, which once understood how working men and women were hurt by the Democrats’ high-tax regime, put out a remarkably strident commentary the other day. It asserted that “all serious thinkers, regardless of party or ideology” agree that the federal government has gone “fiscally insane.” In a fit of old fashioned xenophobia, the Times has started complaining that foreigners are participating so actively in funding the fiscal deficit. This is, in fact, a natural occurrence when America is growing so much faster than so much of the rest of the world.

The fact is that no matter how much the left argues that our foreign relations have been ruined, foreigners are buying in to the Bush boom in historic numbers, as they did the Reagan boom. On its front page, the Times was unwilling to report the changes in the deficit in an unalloyed fashion and is willing to highlight it on its editorial page only to dismiss its significance. At The New York Sun we don’t mind saying we think it’s important news. And we have little doubt that as the news gets out, the American people will react in a rational and intelligent fashion.