Do Voters Want to Go Back?

Barack Obama framed Tuesday's election results quite nicely.  Not, not in his post-election press conference, when he blamed the Democrat losses on the inability to "inform" the electorate, but in his run-up to the election, campaigning on the theme, "do you want to return to the failed policies of the past?"




Few voters, myself included, look back at the presidency of George W. Bush as some sort of utopia, or even "the good old days."

But if Obama is asking voters if they'd like to go back to the days before Democrats took control of Congress--i.e., 2006, when the unemployment rate was 4%--I think its pretty clear most voters said "Yes, we would!"

Or, since he wasn't up this cycle, if Obama was asking voters if they'd like to go back to the last time we had divided government, with Republicans controlling Congress and a Democrat president--i.e., during the mid-1990s, when the economy was flourishing--I'd say most voters like that ideas too.