WaPo:
A couple weeks back, President Obama channeled Ronald Reagan and asked the American people to consider whether they were better off today than when he took over as president.
The answer, at the time, appeared to be no. And now, it’s looking like a definite no.
The new Washington Post-ABC News poll asked people a pretty direct question: “Would you say you yourself are better off financially than you were when Obama first became president, not as well off, or in about the same shape as then financially?”
The results: Just 22 percent of Americans say they are better off financially than when Obama took over in January 2009. Slightly more (30 percent) say they’re worse off, and nearly half (46 percent) say they’re in about the same situation.
Even among Democrats, just 37 percent say they are better off under Obama, while 51 percent say they’re virtually in the same spot. Among Obama’s most loyal constituency, African Americans, 33 percent say they’re better off, with most (again) choosing the middle-ground option.
In both of these cases, there are more “better offs” than “worse offs,” but that’s still not exactly a ringing endorsement of his presidency.
We would remind folks that, when Obama took over, the United States was in the midst of a full-fledged economic crisis. Congress just a few months earlier had passed the bank bailout, and the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. Things were very bad, and technically speaking, it would seem the vast majority of Americans are indeed better off than their mid-recession selves.
