When dealing with this type of claim we begin by recognizing that most phenomena which we are interested in studying are truly multi-dimensional so there are a number of measures which we could use to describe performance. When we are talking about a firm we could use revenue, profit, market share, growth, debt, ... In your economics course you will learn about a number of measures of economic performance such as the unemployment rate, employment growth, inflation rate, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to describe . What you will note is that the messages that they are sending are not always consistent, that it is not uncommon for the economic news to be simultaneously good and bad. As you can see below, the economic expansion which produced lower unemployment rates during her tenure in office, came at a cost- higher inflation. If we evaluated her on inflation, we may find that we were unhappy with her and vote her out.