Romney tries to get voters to blame Obama — not Bush — on the economy

[Geee]

TheHill:

There are two components to Mitt Romney’s economic argument against President Obama, and right now he’s in the midst of arguing the most important one — that the president, and not George W. Bush, deserves blame for the bleak economy.

If Romney succeeds in making that argument, he’s got a good shot at becoming the next president. If he fails, then his entire candidacy will likely fall.

 

The first component of Romney’s three-point argument is that the economy is, quite simply, awful. This is the easiest argument to make, and Romney has pushed it relentlessly.

For the past year and a half, he’s flooded voters with emotional images of laid-off workers juxtaposed with a slew of statistics reminding everyone that the suffering is as broad as it is acute. Most voters agree. A recent Fox News poll showed that 83 percent thought the economy was in either a recession or a downturn.

Obama’s campaign has countered by claiming that the economy is making progress, but so far, his assurances haven’t seemed to move voters. According to a Real Clear Politics average of polls, only 31 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track, while 62 percent say it’s on the wrong track.

Clearly, voters are buying Romney’s first argument — that the economy is deeply troubled.

Still, even if Romney wins that component of his argument in a landslide, there’s no guarantee he’ll earn any votes from it. In order to do that, he has to convince voters that the economic mire around them is Obama’s fault.

At first, it would seem a fairly easy argument; after all, Obama is the incumbent and has been president for almost four years.

But voters have proven surprisingly stubborn at pinning blame on the man who preceded Obama. A Gallup poll released last week showed that 68 percent of adults said Bush deserved a “great deal” or “moderate” amount of blame for the economy, while just 52 percent said the same about Obama.