President Obama and former President George H.W. Bush meet in the Oval Office.
President Obama is pleading with the American people to give him some more credit for the economy's recovery. If history is any guide, he won't get it, and his party will pay the price this fall.
Call it his Bush problem.
It's conventional wisdom that President George H.W. Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid because of the weak economy. But that memory is off. Bush was presiding over a vigorous economic recovery in the months before voters headed to the polls, with the economy growing at a 4.4 percent pace in the first three quarters of the year. Better than now.
But Americans were still feeling bad about the economy -- a recession in the not-so-distant past -- and viewed Bush as tone deaf to their plight. Bill Clinton used the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," but if it had really been about the economy that year, Clinton might have lost.
"The United States was not in recession at any point in 1992. The growth quite strong," recalls Robert Grady, then deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and later a campaign adviser to other Republicans. "But clearly by that time the impression was already formed in the public mind that the recovery was quite slow."
In the Consumer Comfort Index polls at the time, only 9 percent rated the national economy as “excellent” or “good” in November 1992. It had stayed within a narrow band of 7 to 12 percent all year.
"Economic change happens historically many months before an actual change in public sentiment," said William Galston, a former Clinton White House adviser now at Brookings. "The Bush 41 team was very frustrated because their view was the the economy was already recovering rather nicely and they had gotten no credit for it. And they were right on both counts."
Perceptions have been slow to change for Obama, too.
A Pew Research Center poll in September showed that when asked a multiple choice question about the unemployment rate, only 33 percent of Americans gave the correct answer of 6 percent while 45 percent said the unemployment rate was 9 or 12 percent. Only 4 percent of those polled said the rate was 3 percent. Voters in polls say Republicans are to be trusted more on the economy.
The growth in the economy this year is actually slower than it was in 1992, in part because of the economy contracted 2.1 percent in the first quarter of this year. That might have been because of the frigid weather, but it still hurt businesses and workers -- and Obama.
Fifty four percent of Americans disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy, while only 42 percent approved, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in September, even though the economy was growing at a brisk pace and unemployment was sinking below the 6 percent threshold for the first time in six years.
His poor ratings are considered a drag on the prospect of Democrats running for Congress next month. In the Post/ABC poll Americans said they trusted Republicans more than Democrats with taking care of the economy.
"There’s no parallel for a five and a half year lag between the technical end of a recession and negative public sentiment," Galston said. "So you need an additional explanation for that lag."
A couple theories abound: Median income hasn't recovered. Wealth has continued to decline. Jobs don't feel as secure, with far more part-timers out there who want full-time jobs.
Obama stumped on economic issues last week, giving a speech at Northwestern University and visiting a steel warehouse and processing facility. He said much has been accomplished and that much remains to be done. But if he wanted to get political credit and help Democrats in the mid-term elections, his timing may be too late.
