Much is being made of the new Gallup Poll that shows more Americans blame George W. Bush for the current state of the economy than Barack Obama. Sixty-eight percent of Americans think the 43rd president deserves a great deal or a moderate amount of blame for America’s economic problems. That’s more than the 52 percent who feel the same way about the 44th president. The Obama campaign is taking this to heart. In his recent speeches Obama has taken to more or less asking the public for a mulligan on the economy because even after three and a half years in office, the country’s problems are, he says, Bush’s fault. This poll would seem to validate his conclusion that this is a good campaign strategy. But the idea that Bush’s numbers should give much comfort to the Democrats as President Obama tries for a second term this fall is laughable.
The first reason why the president’s re-election team shouldn’t place much faith in this poll as a guide to their campaign tactics is obvious. While Bush is still deeply unpopular, he is not on the ballot in November. Obama is, and the idea that the president can be re-elected simply because he is not Bush makes no sense.
Second, Gallup has been asking this question since Obama took office. In July 2009, it was not unreasonable that 80 percent of those questioned blamed Bush while only 32 percent blamed Obama. But during the last three years, the gap between the two has narrowed dramatically, with a majority of those polled blaming Obama for the past two years even as the number of those pinning it on Bush has declined.
Bush left office on the heels of a dramatic economic downturn in his last year in office that culminated in a Wall Street collapse during the fall of 2008 which ensured that Republican presidential nominee John McCain had no chance of succeeding him. After the fallout from Hurricane Katrina and the bloody aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s second term began to appear as a failed presidency, with even supporters of the GOP thinking ill of him. The hangover from those dark days still influences polling about Bush, who registers as even more unpopular than a truly failed president like Jimmy Carter.
It is certainly possible many Americans will go on blaming Bush for our problems in the coming years, even long after both he and Obama leave office. But that says more about the way the country thinks about him than it does about the 2012 election.
Were the Republican challenging the president someone closely associated with the Bush administration, a re-election campaign focused on blaming Bush for the nation’s problems might make some sense. But Mitt Romney is not such a figure. While his foreign policy approach seems broadly similar to that of Bush and rightly so from my point of view, that cannot truly be said of much of his economic and other domestic proposals. Conservatives compared Romney to Bush and called him a “big government Republican” during the GOP primaries. But the truth is, he is far more of a fiscal hawk and presents a different take on federalism issues as his rejection of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education policies showed.
But a campaign that is still counting on animus toward George W. Bush being enough to carry Obama back to the White House this year is one that is clearly short on new ideas. More to the point, the reversion to blaming Bush is a tacit confession that nothing Obama has tried in the past three years has worked. Because his signature legislative accomplishments — ObamaCare and the billion-dollar stimulus boondoggle — are both deeply unpopular, the president has no domestic accomplishments to brag about except bogus economic statistics that ring hollow to a nation that knows how bad things still are.
The backlash against the president’s claim that the private sector is “doing just fine” shows just how badly he seems to have miscalculated the public’s mood. If he goes on spending the next five months trying to blame Bush rather than taking responsibility for his own failed administration, he will soon be joining the 43rd president on the sidelines as his successor gets a chance to fix the mess he leaves behind.
This is why Romney needs to do more than just mock Obama's failure to understand that the economy is in trouble, he needs to argue that it is Obama's policies that have greatly contributed to the lousy recovery we're having.
Speaking of mendacity, in June 2006 the unemployment rate was 4.6% Now let me think, what's the unemployment rate right now…?
It's 0.4% higher after three and a half years of Obama, moving in the wrong direction, with no relief in sight. And of course, the real problem is GDP growth, or rather the lack thereof. It’s interesting that you cited Reagan. It’s quite true that his first two years were tough. But in FY 1983, GDP grew at a 4.3% clip. It hit 7.3% clip in FY1984. In FY 1985 it slowed but was still a healthy 3.9%. In FY 1986 the number was 3.4% The average for the Reagan expansion years was 4.3% and for the Reagan years as a whole 3.5%. And of course, once GDP growth took off, the economy began to generate hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. See anything like that on the horizon today? Think Son of Stimulus can crank up the Great American Job Engine? Think hiring a few cops, firemen and teachers with borrowed money will restore the job market to health? No, the truth is that Obama is an economic ignoramus who at this point in his presidency really has no idea what to do.
If we had not off-shored so much of our manufacturing base that sort of GDP growth would indeed be on the horizon today. In the 1980's Zenith was still manufacturing televisions in the USA. Reagan was imposing tariffs to protect USA production of steel, motorcycles, clothing…because we still produced those goods in large numbers here in the USA. Imagine that. Reagan protected union jobs through tariffs. The GOP has fallen a long way since then. Reagan would be drummed out of today's GOP as a RINO.
Reagan was no friend of unions. n nManufacturing jobs left the U.S. for friendlier shores because of unions, because of lawyers, because of unsustainable benefits and wages, because of corporate taxation, and because of environmental and OSHA and INS regulations. n nYou want the U.S. to go back to manufacturing? You got to fix what's wrong. Reagan tried, but the American people through their Congressional and state representation voted not to follow through, and so here we are with two car companies on life support and little other high value manufacturing. It's just a matter of time before NLRB and the Machinists Union drives Boeing offshore, too, and that will be the end of America as a heavy manufacturer. n nUnions have destroyed American manufacturing and it's about time they were disbanded.
It would have helped if the poll had attempted to isolate the variables a little better. For instance, how many of those 68% are fiscal conservatives who abhorred Bush's spending and rightfully identify it as at least a moderate part of the problem? Team Obama leans on this poll at its own peril – blaming Bush gets dicey when you yourself are Bush on steroids.
What do you mean he cannot get reelected on the sole ground that he is not Bush. It was on that ground alone that he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sad but true.
Yeah but that was Europe.
“But that says more about the way the country thinks about him…” Oh come now. Surely the effect of Obama’s claquers in the liberal-oriented media and Hollywood-dominated popular culture (who had a lot to do with getting him elected, in the first place) has more to do with it than anything else.
Every time Obama brings up W, I think of BO again. With regard to any sense of responsibility for his job, we are essentially in W's third term right now
So Bush was "responsible" for the 2008 financial meltdown, so what? The issue four years later with Mr. Obama is whether Obama 'fixed" the problem and he didn't. You know it, I know it, and so does everybody except Obama's sycophants.
By continuing to blame Bush, Obama is saying he's not up to the task. Why should people vote for an admitted failure.