A while back, James Carville’s group Democracy Corps came out with a report that went into some detail about the current economic situation that many Americans are now facing and how the perception of the “new normal” will have an impact on the coming election. They interviewed a number of people about their lives and how they were doing in the current economic depression and the stories are very depressing indeed. While some people have been lucky enough to keep their jobs, many are living on much less than they were before. Even if they have been able to find a new position, often it is less than what they had before, with less pay and benefits. Many people are moving back in with parents, or friends in order to survive. Costs for food and energy are up and that puts a bigger hole in many people’s budgets. People are finding that in this new climate, they are losing their dreams of a better life. Many are worried about just being able to survive.
Carville’s report argues that if The Obama-Fuhrer tries to sell the old narrative that things are really OK and that the economy is getting better, they will lose the election. (We certainly think this would be a good thing for everyone) The old sales pitch is not working with the voters who are able to look around and see for themselves that things are not going at all well. And they don’t like being lied to or having some rich elite media type tell them that everything is peachy and that they should be satisfied with the “new normal” that has been forced on them by this administration.
And now with the addition of Paul Ryan into the mix, things get really interesting. Here we have an individual who can articulate just what has gone wrong with Obama’s command and control socialist utopia. Ryan knows the economic issues back and forth and can explain to Americans just how the drive to make government ever bigger and more intrusive is what has driven the economy off the cliff and made everyone’s life that much more difficult and painful. The Democrats are now in a panic because they weren’t counting on this sort of thing happening and they have no plan “B” with which to fight back. They are reduced to hurling insults because they cannot run on their economic record, just as Carville has said, and they have nothing else to show the voters.
What is clear from this fresh look at public consciousness on the economy is how difficult this period has been for both non-college-educated and college-educated voters – and how vulnerable the prevailing narratives articulated by national Democratic leaders are.1 We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class.
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
