“Consumers don’t expect a slowing economy,” said Richard T. Curtin, who heads the surveys of consumers at the University of Michigan. “According to consumers, we are going to improve.”

Given the parallels, perhaps it is not surprising that the economy is providing the same sort of political ammunition as it did 10 years ago.

“Profits are up for our companies, but where are the wage increases?” asked Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in an online conversation with voters last month, after announcing that she intends to run for president. “Where are the, you know, the benefits that should accrue to hard-working Americans?”

Wage increases have, indeed, been slow in coming. In December, 61 months after the economy started to grow, the wages of production and other nonmanagement workers were barely 1.7 percent higher, after inflation, than when the economy hit bottom in November 2001. Most of those gains came in the last few months.

But many people have forgotten that, initially, the expansion of the 1990s was also called a “jobless recovery,” and then a “joyless” one, when employment started growing but real wages did not. In April 1996, 61 months into that growth cycle, the hourly wages of nonmanagement workers were actually worth 0.4 percent less, after inflation, than when the expansion began.

“Now this is a real economic slowdown,” Mr. Dole said on a campaign stop in Florida in October of that year. “And I might say, it’s disastrous news for American workers and businesses and even worse news for low- and moderate-income Americans who have been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed by lower wages and higher taxes in this administration.”

Advocates on each side insist that government policy was crucial to steering the economy. Gene B. Sperling, a former economic adviser to Mr. Clinton, argued that his administration’s efforts to cut the budget deficit were instrumental in bringing down interest rates and improving investors’ confidence in the economy.