Stumped By a Simple Question

The question sure sounds simple enough: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” When Ronald Reagan asked voters this at an October 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, it hit them like a ton of bricks.

The answer was, no, the economy was certainly not better, and voters didn’t need to wait around another four years to see if the great Carter experiment was finally going to work.

This time, apparently, the question has taken on new meaning. And no one working for President Obama’s reelection campaign, at least, seems to understand it.

If they do, they clearly haven’t figured out how to answer it. Over the weekend (just before the Democratic National Convention started in Charlotte, mind you), the Obama campaign’s famously fine-tuned message machine spontaneously combusted.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley candidly answered no (yet with a hedge — “but that’s not the question of this election”). Adviser David Plouffe refused to answer, adviser David Axelrod danced around it (“It’s going to take some time to work through it”) — and Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse mystifyingly compared the President to an airline pilot. I think.

Then, after all the surrogates were given a spanking and their proper scripts, we got the spin from Obama’s other surrogates — the liberal media — which insisted in earnest that it was a hard question, with nuanced answers. Obama’s apologists have an unending supply of nuance.

Reagan, the White House cowboy, was a simple guy who tended to reject “nuance” as obfuscation.

He put the question this way, in the simplest of terms: “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?”

Today some have tried to answer that question with numbers — jobless numbers from the right (unemployment still above 8%), stock market numbers on the left (earlier in August, the Dow Jones industrial average flirted with the peaks of 2007).

Those numbers matter, of course. But what Reagan was getting at wasn’t a numbers issue. It was a feeling, at once hard to describe but easy to communicate. Is life easier for you? Do you feel good? Do you like where you are?

It was Reagan’s greatest gift — he spoke with emotional fluency.

Obama’s attempt at emotion has had mixed results, even if he is a famously gifted speaker. He has, at times, given stirring speeches about his own American experience. And the President has certainly tapped into the emotional frustrations of the middle class, galvanizing a war between the haves and the have-nots.

But at other times, he’s missed the mark. And when he misses, he misses huge.

His now infamous “guns and religion” speech in San Francisco was one of the worst attempts at speaking to the emotional core of the country.

And most recently, he told a Virginia crowd that individual success is essentially a fable. Whatever you think Obama meant when he said “you didn’t build that,” he garbled any economic arguments he was trying to make. He sounded smug instead of compassionate. The worst part is, this happens often.

That’s why the economic numbers tell only part of the story.

The numbers that really matter speak to the country’s emotional state.

And, boy, is Obama in trouble there.

Monday, a survey conducted by The Hill revealed that 52% of likely voters say the nation is in worse shape than it was in September 2008.

That same poll also found that 54% of likely voters say Obama doesn’t deserve a second term based on his job performance, and 50% called themselves “very unsatisfied” with the President’s handling of the economy.

But wait, it gets even worse. The Real Clear Politics average of polls from August on whether the country is moving in the right direction has 63% of respondents saying the country is on the wrong track. One poll, from ABC News/Washington Post, had that number at 69%. Last October, the Real Clear Politics average was a whopping 77%. I guess the slight improvement since last year could be called progress — but it’s nothing for the President to tout.

If this election were just about the economic numbers, both sides could cherry-pick their favorites and sell the country on stats and figures. But this election, just like the one in 1980, will be about feelings.

And as long as that question — Are you better off? — looms large over the next few months, Obama will have to dig deep to come up with an answer that speaks not to our intellect, but to our collective gut.