Democrats’ message to send to voters: It’s really not as bad as it used to be

As the economy struggles to rebound from a deep recession,
Democrats have settled on a campaign message for voters impatient with the slow
pace of job growth: Never forget how bad it was.

Reminders of the depths of the economic collapse have become
a hallmark of Democratic speeches, and party officials say they will be a fixture
on the stump this fall.

{mosads}In a broad defense of his administration’s economic policy
on Wednesday, President Barack Obama referred at least five times the dire
conditions he faced upon taking office 16 months ago. He described “one of the
worst economic storms in our history,” “an economy that was shrinking at an
alarming rate,” “the deepest downturn since the Great Depression,” and “a $3
trillion hole in our budget.”

Congressional leaders have taken the same approach. Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her aides frequently highlight a V-shaped chart
displaying the steep rise and fall of job losses (and more recently, job gains)
under the Bush and Obama administrations. And House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer
(D-Md.) routinely begins his weekly progress reports with statistic-laden
repudiations of the Bush administration economy that Democrats inherited.

“You have got to put this in context,” Hoyer told reporters
last month, before detailing from memory job losses during President George W.
Bush’s final year in office.

“They handed us the reins in January of 2009 at a very, very
tough time,” he said later. “The worst economic downturn in three-quarters of a
century. I keep emphasizing that because this was not just a simple downturn.”

The reminders could take on new urgency after a monthly jobs
report on Friday showed sluggish private sector growth and offered fresh
evidence that the national unemployment rate, now at 9.7%, would remain
elevated through the November elections.

Democratic strategists insist the message is necessary to
keep the memory of the meltdown fresh in voters’ minds, even as Republicans
attack it as a deflection of blame from a party that has held the reins for
nearly a year and a half.

“It’s the most important political objective in the country.
Voters need the story of how we got here and what caused it,” Democratic
strategist Paul Begala said.

Begala and other Democrats said the frequent reminders of
the economic crash are key to making the November midterm elections a choice between
Democrats and Republicans as opposed to merely a referendum on Democratic
policies, which polls show are unpopular. “It’s not only backward-looking. It’s
prospective,” Begala said.

To that end, Democrats say their ongoing attacks on the Bush
administration are about more than assigning blame for the economic crisis.

“The best indicator of what Republicans would do in the
future is what they’ve done in the past – which is championing the failed Bush
economic agenda that only benefited corporate special interests at the expense
of middle class families,” a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, Ryan Rudominer, said.

Republicans counter that Democrats are merely trying to
change the subject.

“The state of the economy when President Obama took office
is less relevant to voters than the job-killing agenda Democrats have imposed
that have only made things worse,” said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the
National Republican Congressional Committee. “Rather than desperately searching
for a political message to gloss over their misguided priorities, Democrats
should try to answer the question Americans have been asking since day one:
Where are the jobs?”

While an emphasis on the meltdown in 2008 was legitimate in
the first months of the Obama presidency, it is a risky electoral strategy as
the administration nears its 18-month mark, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of
political science at Princeton University.

“It’s too late” for Democrats to focus on the failures of
Bush and how bad the economy could have gotten without their intervention,
Zelizer said. Voters, he said, want to hear about “the president who is in
office as opposed to the president who was in office.”

“They blame whoever’s in power,” he said.

For Democrats, the political challenge in 2010 is similar to
the one faced by Republicans in 2004, when GOP leaders had to defend policies
they put in place after the terrorist attacks of 2001, even as the searing
images of Sept. 11 were fading from the public memory. Republicans pointed to
the attacks to explain how a budget surplus they inherited became a deficit,
and to justify national security policies that had drawn criticism from
Democrats.

Just as Republicans warned then of returning to a “pre-9/11
mentality,” Obama in his speech Wednesday told an audience in Pittsburgh that
the U.S. “can’t afford to return to the pre-crisis status quo.”

Zelizer said the argument was easier in some respects for
Republicans, because they could point to the fact that the nation had not suffered
another terrorist attack after Sept. 11.

“They could use that to claim things had gotten better under
their control,” he said. For Democrats, the economy remains fragile and the
recovery has been slow.

“It was a better argument that Republicans had politically
than Democrats have today,” Zelizer said.