Why Obama Is Winning: 57% of Registered Voters Blame Bush and GOP for Economy

By: Jason Easley/politicususa

A new CNN poll explains why President Obama is leading in the polls. By margin of 57%-35%, registered voters blame George W. Bush and the Republican Party for the poor condition of the economy.

The CNN/ORC poll began with what should have been some good news for Romney. By a margin of 68%-32%, registered voters rated economic conditions in the country as poor. This moment of temporary Romney optimism was crushed by the fact that 67% of registered voters expect their economic condition to be good next year. Forty four percent of voters consider themselves worse off than they were four years ago, compared to 37% who say that they are better off.

The back breaker for Romney came when registered voters were asked which policies were more to blame for the country’s current economic problems, George W. Bush and the Republicans or Barack Obama and the Democrats. Fifty seven percent of registered voters said that Bush and the Republicans are responsible, compared to 35% who blamed Obama and the Democrats.

A deeper look inside the who is responsible numbers reveals that by a margin of 53%-37%, Independents think Bush and the GOP are responsible for the current state of the economy. Fifty six percent of men and fifty eight percent of women still hold Bush and the GOP responsible. White people narrowly hold Bush and Republicans more responsible, 48%-42% Americans under age 50 hold Bush and the Republican Party more responsible by a more than 2 to 1 margin, 62%-30%. The only groups polled that hold Obama and the Democrats responsible are Republicans (72%) and conservatives (52%).

The reason why Obama is winning is because voters are agreeing with his message that the economy is getting and will continue to get better. The likely and registered voters in this poll expect it to be better by next year. Voters aren’t believing Mitt Romney when he claims that if Obama gets reelected the economy will get worse.

More importantly, Republicans nominated a self styled economic Mr. Fix It whose solutions voters are viewing as the cause of the problem. The registered voters in this poll are still holding George W. Bush and his party responsible for the economy. This means that Romney’s economic plan, which is to do what Bush did, is signalling to voters that he may very well make things worse if elected.

In short, Romney is failing to convince voters that the economy is Obama’s fault. The voters in this poll have not forgotten who was in office during the economic collapse, and Mitt Romney has not been able to convince them that he would do anything to make it better.

Pundits and pollsters have expressed confusion over why Obama has been able to lead Romney while hauling around such a sluggish economy. The answer is simply that voters aren’t blaming the president for the economy. They still view the economic mess as something that he inherited from George W. Bush. Romney’s attacks on Obama over the economy are falling flat because a majority of voters are rejecting his basic premise that Obama is to blame for the economy.

Voters see the economy going in the right direction, they agree with President Obama that it will get even better, and they are still holding George W. Bush and the Republican Party responsible for the economic collapse.These three reasons are why Barack Obama is so far defying the odds, and is positioned to win reelection in the midst of a stubborn and difficult economy.

The Complete Dishonesty Of Fox News' Economic Context

JEREMY HOLDEN/Media Matters for America:

Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum rewrote economic history to blame President Obama for the recession that began in December 2007, arguing that the economy "got worse" in 2009.

The Commerce Department on Friday reported that the economy grew by 1.5 percent during the second quarter, a slower rate of growth than the first three months of the year. MacCallum, claiming to provide "a little context" to those figures, noted that the economy actually declined throughout 2008. She then put some deceptive Fox spin on the numbers:

It got worse in 2009. In fact, that's when we had our two quarters of consecutive loss and that's what put us into the actual official recessionary status.

Nothing about MacCallum's analysis is true.

The economy reached official recessionary status in December 2007 - not in 2009. It got worse in 2008. In fact, during the final quarter of that year, the economy shrunk by 8.9 percent. Nearly 2 million jobs were lost during that one quarter, which was the worst for economic growth in more than 50 years.

Contrary to MacCallum's claim, the economy did not get worse in 2009. While the economy continued to contract during the first half of 2009, it did so at a slower rate than during the last quarter of 2008 before turning to growth in the second half of that year. The recession officially ended in June 2009.

MacCallum's economic distortion furthers the conservative argument that President Obama made the economy worse.

Meanwhile, actual economists are noting that the economy is not growing quickly enough because of drastic cuts to government spending. Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the current economic situation "a picture of an economy hobbled by premature austerity," led by severe cuts in spending by state and local governments. Government spending, which makes up part of the GDP figures released on Friday, has declined for 8 consecutive months.  

And while the White House has pushed Congress to pass a jobs bill that would provide aid to states and local governments, Fox News has led a campaign to celebrate the very austerity measures that economists say are hampering economic growth.

5 Reasons Americans Are Right To Blame Bush For The Economy

By Annie-Rose Strasser and Tara Culp-Ressler/Think Progress

Sixty-eight percent of Americans — including 49 percent of Republicans — say President George W. Bush is responsible for the state of today’s economy, a new Gallup poll finds.

Indeed, the country is still reeling from Bush’s disastrous economic stewardship. His irresponsible tax cuts and deregulatory policies have contributed significantly to the slow recovery and are partly responsible for the nation’s economic plight. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. Deregulated Wall Street: It was a great time to be a Wall Street executive during the Bush administration. Sweeping financial deregulation helped build the housing bubble and allowed financial institutions to pursue risky trades unchecked. In fact, Bush eliminated the rules that allowed Wall Street to cause the financial crash that plunged the nation into the Great Recession.

2. Cut Taxes For The Wealthy: The Bush tax cuts — over 50 percent of which benefited the richest 5 percent of American taxpayers — cost about $2.5 trillion over the decade after they were enacted. Ten years later, Bush’s tax cuts are still the main driving factor of the national debt:

3. Ran Up A Tab On Two Wars: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the country trillions of dollars. Combined with Bush’s tax cuts, war spending was amain factor in blowing up the deficit and spending the surplus accumulated under Clinton. Lawmakers now use the deficit as an excuse for inaction.

4. Left Homeowners In A Lurch: While Bush was happy to help out the banks in the wake of the housing crisis, he did little to assist struggling homeowners.Hope For Homeowners, Bush’s proposal to assist those struggling with their mortgages, was a colossal failure; in its first six months, it helped just one homeowner renegotiate his mortgage. Many mortgage holders — 15.7 million or, one in three — are still underwater today.

5. Weakened Workers: Bush weakened worker safety regulations and collective bargaining rights under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Department of Labor throughout his time in office. Today, corporations are back to making record profits, while workers’ incomes are falling.

Fox News host cheers ‘positive’ job losses

By Stephen C. Webster/Raw Story

In a Sunday evening segment, Fox News business reporter Brenda Buttner suggested that the loss of public sector jobs — which have come largely out of cities, counties, school districts and states — is actually “a positive” development for the U.S. economy.

“Government is a little bit losing jobs, and that’s something that we see as a positive because we want government to lose jobs to get more in-line with the private sector,” she explained during an appearance on America’s News Headquarters.

She didn’t elaborate on what that actually means — bringing government “more in-line with the private sector” — but her analysis that public sector job losses are “a positive” would strike most economists as quite wrong.

Speaking to U.S. News and World Report last month, Joel Naroff, president of the Pennsylvania-based Naroff Economic Advisers, explained that for every job lost in the public sector, jobs are also lost from the private sector due to the loss of yet another individual or family spending their earnings back into the economy.

“If we’re losing [20,000 to 25,000 jobs] in the public sector, that’s income and spending that doesn’t occur,” he said. “It’s more like [35,000 to 40,000] jobs as a result of that. So one job isn’t just one job; it’s more than one job. And so the private sector gets affected.”

He added the obvious: for every job lost in the public sector, the private sector must work even harder to drive U.S. unemployment down. Public sector job losses due to the end of federal stimulus funds were blamed for November’s mostly neutral jobs report, where private sector growth was dragged down by losses in the public sector.

Public sector losses have been a constant since President Barack Obama took office at the start of 2009, with more than 500,000 laid off by July of 2011. If public sector payrolls had remained closer to the levels seen at the start of 2009, the overall U.S. unemployment rate would be much lower than it is today.

But for Buttner and many on America’s political right, laying off teachers, firefighters, police officers and other city, county and state workers is something to be desired, and right in-line with their often repeated goal of shrinking government.

Although she’s supposed to be a business reporter, Buttner’s appearance Sunday seemed to imply she’s more inclined to cheer Republicans’ efforts to put more people out of work in the middle of a jobs crisis, rather than trumpeting tangible improvements to the nation’s employment outlook.

This video is from Fox News, broadcast Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012, as clipped by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters.