William McGurn :Are You Better Off? Obama will have to answer the question Reagan asked in 1980
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Are You Better Off?
Obama will have to answer the question Reagan asked in 1980.
White House adviser David Plouffe was hammered this week when he offered that “the average American” isn’t going to “vote based on the unemployment rate.” His remark gained instant notoriety after Friday’s dismal jobs report showing an unemployment rate up to 9.2%.
In fact, Mr. Plouffe was right.
In and of itself, an unemployment figure will not drive voters one way or the other. As others were quick to point out, however, that should be of little consolation to the Obama White House. For the question that Mr. Plouffe should be worried about is how people think the unemployment figure affects themselves and their hopes for the future. Ronald Reagan understood this well, which is why his question at the end of his only debate with Jimmy Carter was so devastating:
“When you make [your decision to vote next Tuesday],” he said to the American people, “it might be well if you would ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?”
These days parts of America feel like a rerun of the 1970s, with Washington emanating malaise and Americans told to ratchet down their dreams and expectations for the future. Yes, the White House is correct that we shouldn’t draw too many broad conclusions from any one or two jobs reports. But the challenge facing the president is that the jobs numbers reflect a larger unease about where things are headed.
Moms and dads, for example, know that they are paying more to put food on the table. They are also paying nearly $4 per gallon when they fill up their cars. Even those who have jobs are scared—some because they might lose them, others because the lack of strong economic growth means that they have fewer opportunities to move up the ladder.
Associated PressMoms and dads know that they are paying more to put food on the table. Will the official response from the White House dispel their concerns?
The official response from all the president’s men is not likely to dispel these fears. When asked about the latest numbers, Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, stated that the best-case scenario for 2012 will be an unemployment rate of 8.2%. If so, lots of people will remember that 8.2% is still higher than the rate was when Mr. Obama entered office, notwithstanding all his spending and all those promises of jobs “created or saved.”
So what’s a president going to do, given a present situation that seems stagnant and a future prosperity that even his own people are now saying is ever more distant?
In a recent post on his Washington Post blog, Chris Cillizza provided the likeliest answer Mr. Obama would give to the “Are you better off?” question. According to Mr. Cillizza, President Obama’s argument on the economy will boil down to 10 words: “You should have seen how bad it would have been.”
How different that is from 2008. In 2008, Mr. Obama was the man of the future, the candidate of change who declared that his nomination would mark the moment “when the rise of oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Alas, instead of assuring us that a brighter future is just ahead, these days the president seems focused on painting the past in ever darker colors.
From his first days in office, of course, President Obama has made “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” a standard talking point. More recently, however, he added that he “did not realize the magnitude, because most economists didn’t realize the magnitude, until fairly far into it.”
Ditto for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. When David Gregory asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether the Treasury secretary was denying responsibility for the economy, Mr. Geithner also invoked the past—”how difficult it was going to be to fix,” how we were “falling off the cliff” when Team Obama arrived, how the specter of a “second Great Depression” loomed, etc.
The problem, says the Obama administration, isn’t its own performance but the public’s unrealistic expectations. In other words, George W. Bush was even worse than we thought.
Maybe that’s a winning message. Maybe Americans who believed Mr. Obama when he said unemployment wouldn’t go past 8% if we passed his stimulus will now be persuaded by his explanation that his job was tougher than he or his economists expected. Maybe that’s the only way to get around the “Are you better off?” question.
Whatever you call it, it’s a long way from “hope” and “change.” And the more the president tries to justify the nagging unemployment and sluggish economic growth by rewriting the past, the more he leaves the argument over the future to his GOP rival.
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