The “Four Years Ago” Folly

“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

The question hit home with voters in 1980, and now Paul Ryan offers Reagan’s canard in response to DNC fervor. Josh Marshall thinks it’s a bad strategy:

George W. Bush is still very unpopular and gets a high degree of blame for the economy, despite leaving office almost four years ago. The latest ABC/WaPo poll shows 54% blame President Bush for the country’s economic woes, compared to 32% for President Obama. Republicans, wisely, have been trying for some time to say Bush is old news, an excuse, etc.

Casting the debate over where the country stands compared to four years ago also plays into the Obama camp’s push to say Romney is Bush redux. Again, good for Obama, bad for Romney. And lest we forget, Romney is (rightly) closely identified with Wall Street, ground zero of the calamity.

It’s possible, perhaps, that Republicans think the “four years ago” question will work because they really do believe the economy was fine until fall 2008. David Bernstein reflects:

In August 2008, prior to the big collapse, most ordinary people believed (correctly) that the economy was going poorly. Obama and the Democrats talked at length at their convention about it; there was a lot of feeling the pain of the middle class during the economic slump.

Republicans refused to believe it. A survey of RNC delegates showed an overwhelming (incorrect) belief that the US economy was doing just fine. McCain and the rest of the speakers didn’t talk about recovery at all.

And now, what do you see? Here’s Paul Ryan at a campaign event on Monday: “Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now.” Conversely, Berstein argues that the bulk of Americans have been insulated from the damage of a slow recovery: “There’s basically the long-term unemployed, who are screwed, and everybody else.” Household assets and wages are stabilizing, and while most people may not be riding as high as pre-2007, they probably feel a lot better than they did in 2007-2010.

But when we were on the precipice of crisis — and then actually in one — in 2008, Republicans eschewed recovery talk (remember McCain on “the fundamentals of our economy”). Now, I’m not so sure that voters would have the “four years ago” answer that Romney wants. And frankly, with unemployment where it is, Romney would do well to just drive home rhetoric concerned with the immediate present. Any day the Romney campaign looks backwards — or for that matter, provides context for a crisis that indirectly links him to George W. Bush or his Wall Street roots — is a lost day, and “four years ago” is a losing strategy.