PJ Media

Jarhead – Just a question: Are you sure it was because Obama was obviously going to win, or because at the exact same time (late september), it was obvious the economy was going to tank?

The fact is, Obama won by the margins he did, because the economic recession and the Republicans, including McCain, took the blame for it. McCain lead up until the last week before the bank fiascos by some pretty confortable margins, with Obama leading only in that last week of semi-economic bliss by an average of 1-2 points in the polls. A week after everyone learned the banks were in a mess, Obama’s lead jumped to almost a double digits in all polls (I mean every one, by checking poll data sites rather than letting the media spin it) and pretty much stayed that way until election day.

The fact is the way he won allows conservatives to rewrite history, since Obama’s good fortune (or bad fortune, depending on how you judge issues), became intermingled with the economy. So when bad things happened, good things happened to Obama. Basically he’s a product of the recession, not the cause of it. I think we can all agree that President Obama will be judged not by the cause of the recession, but how quickly the economy recovers and if it recovers at all after all the spending. I also think a lot of people here and around the US wouldn’t acknowledge it, even if he did fix the economy.