Obama pollster: GOP is trapped in the 1980s, ‘out of gas’ [View all]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/obama-pollster-gop-is-trapped-in-the-1980s-out-of-gas/2012/11/08/093b4f78-29be-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_blog.html

By Greg Sargent

This morning I talked with Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, and he offered fresh detail on the campaign’s theory of the race and on why the President was able to win reelection amid such a bad economy.

“From the start, you had a theory on the Republican side: They were going to make this a referendum on President Obama, using the old Ronald Reagan question,” Benen told me, in a reference to Reagan’s famous “are you better off” line.

“But the American people were focused on, which candidate is going to make my life better over the next four years?” Benenson continued.

“Overwhelmingly, Americans viewed the economic crisis and recession as an extraordinary circumstance — not as an ordinary recession,” Benenson continued, adding that “the more Romney and Republicans tried to talk about this as an ordinary recession,” rather than a “massive crisis,” the more they seemed “out of touch and tone deaf.”

If that’s right, the irony is striking. Romney cast Obama as a failure, based on the notion that the recovery was not proceeding as fast as other recoveries have. But this may not have resonated with voters because they understood that Obama had inherited an extraordinary situation — exactly the idea Romney tried so hard to get voters to forget.

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