One month out, Fear maintains a double-digit lead over Reality

My favorite Gary Larson cartoon (except maybe for the one where the cow cuts in line at the slaughterhouse) is this one: The difference between "what we say to dogs" (i.e., a long lecture to "Ginger" to stay out of the garbage) and "what dogs hear" ("blah blah blah Ginger"). It reminds me a lot of the 2014 midterm election, the lamest election I've seen yet in a long lifetime of increasingly lame elections. Once upon a time, there was at least a correlation between how people voted and actual policy results, especially on the economy (just check out Ford, Carter or Bush 41 on how that worked on the downside, or Reagan and Clinton on how that worked to the upside).

Reality and Barack Obama have a complicated relationship, though. In the multiple prisms through which we judge our presidents, POTUS 44 has been profoundly disappointing in a couple of key ones. One, broadly, is foreign policy, but especially the central issue of the strife-ridden lands that stretch from Libya to Afghanistan. Obama promised a fresh start -- but we've been trapped in the same bomb-rinse-repeat cycle of his predecessors, and at the same time he's expanded the abuses of the national security state instead of curtailing them. The other problem is a matter of style. Like many folks from our half-assed generation who've risen to power, Obama actually believes that rationality trumps emotion, and his style was already flat in Year One of his presidency. In Year Six, Obama can be painful to watch, even when he's announcing good news.

That said, this Reagan fellow was onto something when he boiled American politics down to the basic, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" On the economy, think of where we were six years ago! Since Bush 43 left office, joblessness has plunged, and the stock market has soared. And so far, "Obamacare" has been conservatives' worst nightmare....a success. Paul Krugman (say what you will, but in '08 he was a thinly disguised Clinton fan deeply skeptical of Obama) wrote a long cover story for Rolling Stone breaking down the positives of the current POTUS. Here's one excerpt:

Or compare our performance with that of the European Union. Unemployment in America rose to a horrifying 10 percent in 2009, but it has come down sharply in the past few years. It's true that some of the apparent improvement probably reflects discouraged workers dropping out, but there has been substantial real progress. Meanwhile, Europe has had barely any job recovery at all, and unemployment is still in double digits. Compared with our counterparts across the Atlantic, we haven't done too badly.

Did Obama's policies contribute to this less-awful performance? Yes, without question. You'd never know it listening to the talking heads, but there's overwhelming consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus plan helped mitigate the worst of the slump. For example, when a panel of economic experts was asked whether the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus, 82 percent said yes, only two percent said no.

So would it be a valid point to say that some of the positive gains during Obama's first term-and-a-half aren't getting enough attention in the current election debate? Are you kidding? Actually, the state of the economy is barely a part of the national conversation at all.

What are average, rank-and-file voters talking about? Time Magazine's Joe Klein ventured into the heartland, and what he heard was not pretty. People wanted to talk about whether the U.S. Postal Service was secretly buying up all the nation's ammo...or whether poor people were using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks or "giant bottles of orange soda" (???). Klein concluded:

There is also an undercurrent of fear–about ISIS and Ebola–that does not help the Democrats. Most of the people I talked with don't think this federal government is competent to handle anything. And there is an undercurrent of exhaustion, especially among Democrats who have talked themselves silly trying to dispel the rumor fog that has engulfed political discourse. These are stories that stick in the mind and rot the body politic. They are a dominant political currency, and not just in the South.

Where does that "rumor fog" come from? Heh, well, that's been the dominant topic of this blog for the past decade, hasn't it? Some of it is just Fox News Channel being Fox News Channel, catering to its mostly white, mostly older audience which apparently likes to be scared; some of it is ENN (the Ebola News Network) shamelessly chasing its ratings tale; and some of it is just what POTUS 43 called "rumors on the Internets." (What about liberals and their MSNBC?...like Klein said, most liberals I know are too depressed to watch the news. I think we're watching soccer.)

But this is what voters will hear when they go to the polls on Nov. 4. Blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah.