Now Mitt Romney’s campaign has seized upon the question,
and unsurprisingly, the Republican nominee’s answer is no. When
President Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination
Thursday in Charlotte, North Carolina, he will have to be ready
with a response.
It’s a hard question for the president to answer, and not just because of its provenance. When Obama took office in January 2009, it was pretty much a given that Americans would soon be much worse off. A severe financial crisis was sending the economy into a deep slump. The challenge was not to raise living standards, but to avert another Great Depression.
So the second answer to this question, a simple yes, is pretty much off the table.
Instead, the Obama campaign is saying it’s the wrong question -- a classic political dodge that in this case might be justifiable. Simple measures such as the level of unemployment, though important, won’t suffice to assess Obama’s performance. The president would prefer a variant of the query: Are you worse off now than you would be if he hadn’t been elected four years ago? Grammatical complexity aside, this is a far more subjective question.
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-05/are-we-better-off-there-s-no-easy-answer.html
It’s a hard question for the president to answer, and not just because of its provenance. When Obama took office in January 2009, it was pretty much a given that Americans would soon be much worse off. A severe financial crisis was sending the economy into a deep slump. The challenge was not to raise living standards, but to avert another Great Depression.
So the second answer to this question, a simple yes, is pretty much off the table.
Instead, the Obama campaign is saying it’s the wrong question -- a classic political dodge that in this case might be justifiable. Simple measures such as the level of unemployment, though important, won’t suffice to assess Obama’s performance. The president would prefer a variant of the query: Are you worse off now than you would be if he hadn’t been elected four years ago? Grammatical complexity aside, this is a far more subjective question.
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-05/are-we-better-off-there-s-no-easy-answer.html
No comments:
Post a Comment