Inherited recession?

From salon.com:

So did the recession really precede Bush, as they claim? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the private, nonpartisan research group responsible for tracking the official peaks and troughs of the U.S. economy, the economy began to contract in March of 2001, two months after Bush was inaugurated; the recession marked the end of the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history. Under Clinton, in 1999 alone more than 3 million new jobs were added to the economy. In 2000, the year in which Rob Portman says the country was "spiraling into recession," almost two million new jobs were created in America. Most would consider those numbers a fairly robust inheritance.
And contrast those numbers with employment data during Bush's presidency: About 1.8 million jobs were lost in 2001. Five hundred thousand jobs were lost in 2002. And 61,000 jobs were lost in 2003. It's true that since then, about a million people have found new jobs -- but during the Clinton years, there were a million new jobs added every couple months.
The Republicans may be selling some economic hocus-pocus, but so far "Bush prosperity" isn't buying a whole lot of jobs for the unemployed multitudes in places like Ohio and Michigan.