I try to have faith in people. I think they’ll vote for the candidate who best serves their ends, and I respect that some think Bush is doing that for them.
But a couple of comments in a Washington Post story about how good economic numbers aren’t helping Bush, there are two quotes that stand out.
Maria Sandoval, an elderly Democrat in Colorado Springs, has had a rough time of it in the past few years, living solely on Social Security and relying on the county clinic for her health care. On the economy, Bush “hasn’t done very good,” she allowed. He could have offered more help, she said, and his prescription drug law does not promise her much, either.
But Bush has her vote, she said firmly. “I guess he hasn’t put too much into [the economy], but he’s busy with a lot of other things. He’s on top of everything. That’s what I like about him.”
He’s on top of everything? Like the guy or not, it’s clear that he’s been scrambling for months trying to get on top of the Iraq thing.And then there is this:
During the Clinton years, Jeremy Tuck said he had been selling mobile homes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and, at $45,000 a year, making good money. Last year, he was assembling mobile homes, earning $15,000 and living hand-to-mouth. But Bush has his vote this November. Had Gore been elected in 2000, Tuck said, “we would’ve been taken over by Saddam Hussein or [Osama] bin Laden.”
“You make more money in plain terms when Democrats are in office,” Tuck said with a shrug, “but Republicans are stronger on the military, and that’s why I’m voting for President Bush.”
We would have been taken over by Osama bin Laden? He’s making a third of what he did while Clinton was president and he’s happy. I wish everyone were so easy to please.
More revealing was this.
“Americans are a show-me people,” said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “They need to be shown that things have actually been changed, and I think in an economic recovery, this means seeing the guy down the street getting his job back rather than good jobs numbers.”
… John R. Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggested that voters … may have considerably sharper antennae than economists.
In the fall of 2000, when most economic indicators continued to surge, anxiety among voters began to take a toll on Democrat Al Gore’s White House bid, Zaller said. That anxiety proved to be prescient: By the spring of 2001, the economy had slipped into recession.
This go-round, jobs are coming back, but Americans may sense that those jobs are not of the same quality as the work that was lost, Newport said. Any good economic news is being tempered by high gasoline prices, and a generally sour mood has made voters skeptical.