Slightly more than six years after former House Speaker John Boehner focused the GOP’s attention on the economy, and eventually winning control of the chamber, Democrats are picking up on the same issue as their ticket to victory in the fall elections.
A column by the highly-respected Gerald F. Seib in the Wall Street Journal this week concluded that the recessions of the past 10 years have changed voter attitudes, possibly forever.
And, he added, the scars may be deeper “than has been recognized before.”
Longtime Democratic pollster Peter Hart used a colorful analogy of a house burning to make that point. Seib wrote:
What the country is experiencing “is the difference between a car crash and having your house burn down,” says Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “A car crash is something that fades as the three or six months mark goes by. Your house burning down is never forgotten. It is always there and there is no half-life.”
What’s new here isn’t that the recession was traumatic, of course, but a dawning realization that its psychological aftereffects have been so deep and long-lasting. Why is this becoming clear now, as opposed to four years ago, when an incumbent president was re-elected with relative ease? In 2012, Mr. Hart says, “Americans were still digging out.” Today, they have dug out, yet are still feeling a hangover the isn’t going away. They are acting accordingly.
House burnings can indeed be memorable things and, upon reading that, a light went off at the Secrets desk to a very similar comment made by GOP pollster David Winston after Democrats were swept from House control in the 2010 Tea Party election.
Former House Speaker John Boehner, from my 2011 U.S. News column.
I wrote the Washington Whispers section for U.S. News then, when he was helping the GOP craft its winning message to fight President Obama’s warning to voters against giving the Republicans back the “keys to the car.”
From a January 2011 column after the GOP takeover of the House:
“For most voters, the issue of the economy in contrast with other issues is a little like a house with a fire on the roof,” Winston says in the analysis. “From voters’ perspective, President Obama spent too much time on other issues,” adds Winston. “Despite President Obama’s argument that the American people should not hand the keys back to the Republicans, voters did. But the keys weren’t to a car, they were for a fire truck and the message was clear: Put out the fire.”
Winston first started using the analogy a year earlier, in January 2010, and has always recommended that the GOP focus heavily on economic issues to win. During that election, Boehner repeated “Where are the jobs?”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
