Robert Reich: What Scott Brown's Victory Really Means

[tonysam]

From the right: Just goes to show the country is against Democratic tax-and-spend. Obama’s agenda is in ruins, heath-care is over, the GOP has a good chance of taking back Congress next November. Now, even congessional Democrats will move to the right.

From the left: Just goes to show Obama should never have cozied up to Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Big Insurance. He compromised too much. The Democratic base lost faith in him. The only answer is for Obama and congressional Dems to turn left.

Don’t believe any of it. Here’s what’s really going on. In Massachusetts, in New Jersey, all over the nation, voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what’s left of their savings. Nothing counts more than the economy. Rightly or wrongly, presidents and the party in power are blamed when the economy is lousy. Voters fired Jimmy Carter in 1980 because the economy went south. They fired George Bush the first in 1992 because the economy was awful. They fired congressional Democrats in 1994 because the economy was still awful. And they’re in the process of firing Obama and the Democrats — unless or until the economy turns around.

What happens next November depends both on the extent of joblessness and the direction the economy is moving in. The usual political rule is voters pay more attention to the latter. They’ll forgive even relatively high unemployment if they’re confident the economy is improving. But that old rule hasn’t been tested under conditions of extremely high unemployment. If next November one in five Americans is still unemployed or underemployed or working at lower pay than before the Great Recession, voters may not care that the economy is showing signs of improvement. They’ll vote the rascals out.

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It's the economy, especially jobs, stupid. Always has been, always will be.