Posted on 08/06/2008 2:48:21 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The conventional wisdom has it down pat: A bad economy works against the candidate from the party in power as voters take out their rage and fear on the president’s party and back the challenger, just like they did in 1992. But this is not a normal economic slowdown (or recession) and Obama is not a normal challenger. I think the conventional wisdom may be dead wrong.
It is not so much that unemployment is so high (5.7 percent) or that the economy is in the tank (1 percent growth this quarter) as it is that everything seems to be falling apart. Banks are under assault; mortgages are in default; quasi-government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac need bailouts; financial institutions go hat in hand to foreign sovereign wealth funds peddling shares of their equity in return for desperately needed cash; the cost of filling a gas tank has tripled. It is not the present circumstances that have voters freaked, it is the threats that seem to loom on the horizon.
And Obama is no ordinary challenger. Not like Bill Clinton, for example. In 1992, from the moment the campaign started, Clinton billed himself as the expert who could solve the economy’s problems. His promise to “focus like a laser beam” on the recession won him big points throughout the campaign. His 10-year record as a governor and his chairmanship of the National Governors Association bolstered his credentials. But we first met Barack Obama as an advocate of racial and partisan healing and then as an opponent of the war in Iraq. When he tried to morph into an economic expert in time for the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, voters didn’t buy it and voted for Hillary.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
It should be Obama's leftist policies that scare people away, not his inexperience.
Obama: "If everyone would just make sure their wallets were filled with air, we would beat this recession!"
It beats me why this foot fetishist freak gets so much attention here. His theories are always stupid and implausible.
Bush Sr. lost because of the economy. He won the war, oversaw the destruction of Communism across the world and yet still lost. Unconventional wisdom is almost always wrong - that’s why it’s called unconventional.
Dick Morris is a single-issue “pundit” and his directive was to antagonize Clintons in the mainstream media. Now that Clinton has been destroyed we don’t really need to hear what this clown thinks about the rest of the stuff. He doesn’t strike me as a true conservative.
Call me conventional, but I’ll take “going into November with a strong economy” option.
It should be Obama’s leftist policies that scare people away, not his inexperience.
The real question is: how stupid are the American people? I guess we’ll find out in November.
MSM perpetuated hyperbole! Brings back memories of what the MSM (and ABC News in particular) did to 41 (remember the recession that turned out not to have been a recession after the election?). Historically 5.7 is not high, and "growth" is growth.
The MSM spins the economic numbers to fit it's socialist agenda.
Thanks to the worst demonrat congress in history, it’s unlikely many INTELLIGENT voters are going to turn to the dems for solutions.
Here’s truly hoping that this successfully changes to: “Bad Politicking Will Hurt All Of The Democrats On November 4”!
It's Dick Morris. Next week he'll be writing an article about how the ecomony will be the death of McCain's presidential hopes.
We know McCain. We know he will surround himself with some pretty capable people. And, above all, we know that he won’t raise taxes.
Yeah, right.
IBDeditorials.com is excerpt/link only. Unfortunately your post will have to be removed.
Just for the record:
During the election cycle of 1992, Bill Clinton hammered Bush the elder relentlessly for having caused the “worst economy of the last 50 years.” But in fact, as CNN’s Brooke Jackson subsequently reported in 2001: “Three days before Christmas 1992, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally issued its official proclamation that the recession had ended 21 months earlier. What became the longest boom in U.S. history actually began nearly two years before Clinton took office.”
By the same token, Clinton is generally perceived as having a stellar economic record during his own presidency, in spite of the fact that the economy was already starting to decline during the last year of his term after the stock market crashed in March 2000. According to a report by MSNBC: “The longest economic expansion in U.S. history faltered so much in the summer of 2000 that business output actually contracted for one quarter, the government said Wednesday in releasing a comprehensive revision of the gross domestic product. Based on new data, the Commerce Department said that the GDP — the country’s total output of goods and services — shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000.”
When GW Bush correctly warned the American voters about the nation’s declining economic performance during the 2000 presidential campaign, the same Democrats who had loudly criticized his father for “the worst economy in fifty years” had no problem at all accusing him of “talking down the economy.”
U.S. jobless rate hits six-year low
Clinton’s euphoric, but news causes stocks to plunge
July 5, 1996
Web posted at: 5:50 p.m. EDT
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Economists didn’t expect June’s unemployment rate to be much different from May’s, which was an already-low 5.6 percent. But in fact, it did fall — to 5.3 percent. The unemployment rate hasn’t been that low since June 1990.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/05/jobless/
I saved this a few years ago when researching unemployment rates.
Libby
Everyone knows that Morris is a true liberal, he makes some good points.
Are you voting for Obama, I see you joined here in march 2008. and don’t know Morris is a lib.
“bad economy may hurt obama.”
not with the propaganda arm of the democrat party in action. they will certainly lay it at the feet of the republicans or anyone other than democrats.
the loyal electorate will install democrats in droves in november.
His inexperience should scare people away.
Nobama has zero credentials for being president. He was in the Senate for a mere 143 days of work when he filed to run for president, and he’s been doing that shtick ever since.
His background as a community organizer gives him zilch in terms of experience to be president of the United States of America.
And it certainly doesn’t help that he’s a raving world socialist....as he calls himself — World Citizen Nobama
By framing everything he has ever said in the context of "Bill was brilliant," it has not only made Dickie a one note samba, but it has caused him to be wrong far more often than he has been right.
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