If America is "back," honey, then the old America was just as bad as the new. And it wasn't. Not until that RR-train ran over us and we got dumped in the Bushes.
Jonathan Chait is dead-on when he writes that we shouldn't pretend good times are just around the corner. Most Americans may not have forgotten completely what "good times" ever were and they know we're nowhere near "good times" now. They don't want to hear that everything is hunky-dory.
Obama's campaign speeches have been less temperate than those presidential statements in which he's careful to point out that yes, we're making progress but it is and will continue to be slow progress. Chait discovers that the Obama's drop in the polls coincides, in an uncannily precise fashion, with Obama's overly optimistic campaign speeches, that cry of "America is back!"
Chait quotes from Democracy Corps research, starting with the State of the Union address several weeks back.
Claiming that “America is back” is by far the weakest operative message and produces disastrous results. It is weaker than even the weakest Republican message and is 10 points weaker in intensity than either Republican message. Overall, less than a third of all voters said this message makes them more likely to support the President and a third said this message made them less likely to support Barack Obama. Alarmingly, this message barely receives majority support among self-identified Democrats—and even less support among all other groups. Less than a quarter of independents say this message would make them more likely to support the President and no independents said that it would make them much more likely to support him. ...DemocracyCorps
"If you're the president and your election-year rhetoric is making everybody hate you, you're doing it wrong," Chait writes.
But he isn't particularly worried overall.
The lesson here is not that Obama is doomed, at all. He's actually in pretty decent shape. But he's in decent shape purely because America loathes the Republican Party and all it stands for, and its front-runner is incredibly unpopular. He can win with contrast. Maybe the economy will get to a point where he can run a classic incumbent campaign stressing how wonderful things are going, but he's not there yet. ...Jonathan Chait, DailyIntel
