So I keep lying to be honest

Tell Me Ten Words – Idlewild

Apparently the Romney campaign has decided that the ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’ question is going to be a big theme of their campaign. I get where they’re coming from here. It’s a metric that’s designed to frame the election as essentially a judgment about whether the incumbent deserves a shot to keep going. And given that the Romney campaign’s primary goal is to convince voters that they are just voting for Generic Republican, rather than a particular campaign, that makes a lot of sense.

Of course, the question itself is fundamentally stupid. It doesn’t really matter if you’re better off; the real question is ‘do you think you’ll be better off four years from now?’ After all, you don’t elect presidents in reverse. The point is to decide who will be the best option for the future of the country. And even if we were going to be retrospective, it would still be better to ask ‘are you better off now than you would have been with the other candidate?’ Elections, after all, are a comparison of options, not simply referenda.

It’s also silly for its faux-precision. The precise identification of a president’s term in office with his/her responsibility doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. After all, four years ago today the economy was still stumbling along, but in the following six months went through the biggest catastrophe it’s seen since FDR. That we’re basically back to where we were four years ago is a decently strong endorsement, actually. On the reverse side of things, Clinton skated to re-election in 1996 in part because the recovery which had started in 1992 was going full tilt by that time. But it’s kind of silly to give him full credit for that.

All that said, it’s a fundamentally stupid question that still has some reasonable grounding. It’s not a literal test, it’s more of a proxy question. Predictions about the future are notoriously difficult, particularly when it comes to the economy. So rather than expecting people to make complicated judgments about which economic approach is best-suited for a particular moment, you just use a very simple test ‘does your stuff seem to be working?’

It’s clearly not the best sort of judgment you could possibly put together, but it’s not a terrible thing for politicians to know that they’re going to get stuck with the blame for what happened on their watch.

Still, you’d hope that people would filter that general attitude through some understanding of the particulars. Which, to be fair, is I think what people generally do. They’re willing to hear some explanation of circumstance, but will only put up with a certain amount.

In the case of the 2012 election, it doesn’t take a lot of mitigating circumstances to make a strong case for Obama. The extremity of the inherited crisis, the lack of relevant solutions offered by Romney and co., the intransigence of the Republican opposition, and so on.

I’ve been watching The West Wing, and the campaign to re-elect Bartlet is essentially defined by one side churning out 10-word slogans, while the other side wants to debate the details. I really hope life imitates art and the simplicity of the 10 words ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’ is not enough to overwhelm everything else at stake. Like I said, it is totally reasonable to make a larger argument built around this premise. But the premise alone isn’t much of anything. If Team Romney is able to DO something with it, then they might be in business. Though, I’m not really sure what they CAN do without providing some more detail about how they can fix the problems better.