Yes. Yes it does. People need a scape goat. So find one! That's the advice any candid political consultant gives to their candidate. Why? Because people, all people, like to assign blame when things go wrong much more than they like to give credit when things go right. You can extol the virtues of your actions and their beneficial outcomes till the cows (or Stimulus benefits) come home but it won't tilt the playing field of public opinion in your favor much, and especially not with Fox News trashing you 24-7-365, the other networks playing copycat and even your supposed friends taking shots at you on a regular basis. You know who I'm talking about.
In social science this phenomenon (an ounce of blame is worth a pound of credit, so to speak) has a name. It's called The Knobe Effect (Knobe is pronounced like "strobe."), after Joshua Knobe, the Yale philosophy professor who documented it through experiment. The experiment goes like this....
Two scenarios are presented to the population being tested.
Scenario #1: The director of a corporation is presented with a new program that will make a lot of money but will also harm the environment. Given those facts, the director gives the new program a green light and, indeed, both events occur, profits and pollution. The test group is asked if the director intentionally harm the environment. What do you think?
Scenario #2: The phrase "harm the environment" in Scenario #1 is replaced by "help the environment." Profits increase, environment is helped. The test group is asked if the director intentionally helped the environment.
The results of this test have been repeated by many others who've done it with their own test groups varying in culture and age, among other factors. The results are always the same.
80% of respondents blame the first director while only 20% credit the second.
There's an Evolutionary rationale offered to explain this phenomenon. Things that go bump in the night get much more of our attention much quicker than things that don't because threatening signals are associated with events that might kill us. We really can't afford to be wrong about threatening signals, so our nervous system is wired to be on the alert for them. The sun rising on a cloudless morning hardly gets our attention. That's why we have to be reminded to stop and smell the roses. We don't generally stand to be killed by a rose bush, so we tend to ignore it.
Evolutionarily appropriate or not, the Knobe Effect is what's facing the Democrats in November. The GOP has been the Party of No since President Obama took office. Their entire reason for being is to obstruct or in other ways say "no" to the Democrat's agenda and blame the Obama administration for our troubles. The GOP is aided and abetted by a corporate/old/traditional/whatever media that still serves as the middleman who charges skads of money for political advertisements on the TV machine and rakes in the dough every election cycle no matter what those advertisements have to do with truth or accurately informing the people.
Simply refuting the GOP's attacks does not often work. The Democrats have to go "negative." The thing is, going negative against the GOP should be easy. On a daily basis they offer examples of where they'd like to take the country if they regain majorities in the houses of Congress in November. Readers of DK know the details of the GOP agenda but the bottom line is, uh, er, the bottom line. That's all the GOP knows. They'll take profit over the people any time. They'd like to turn the USA into a cheap labor fiefdom of the trans-national corporations. They'd like to turn the country into a theocracy. All that good stuff.
I'm glad to see that some Democrats are acutely aware of this situation and have begun running ads against the GOP itself that are negative, blame-assigning beatings, with the policies of George W. Bush being highlighted as the cause of our current pains. The beatings should continue! Morale among the Democrats will improve! Every Democratic candidate should be measured by their willingness to blame, blame, blame the Republicans every chance they have for the bad economic news. Actually, Democratic candidates should blame the GOP for the clouds in the sky and the crabgrass in the lawn. Blame them for anything and everything between now and November. Talking up the accomplishments of the Obama administration and the prospects of economic recovery can be put on hold for awhile. Obama, being PRESIDENT OF ALL AMERICANS, has been forced to do happy talk since day one. As Van Jones said, he's inherited the job of taking over the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Trying to buoy our economic animal spirits is what a leader has to do in such dire situations (put aside Geithner for a moment, please. Obama is well aware that Wall Street runs Washington and has had to be delicate with the banksters if for no other reason than to prevent them from flooding the GOP coffers with more money than ever prior to the mid-terms.) Obama has had to be calm, yet focused on the problems. Obama has tried to put politics to the side in his effort to focus on repairing the sinking ship that is the GOP version of America. But now Obama has to, and will, begin to put the hurt on the GOP and talk more frankly and with more partisan vigor about what you're voting for if you vote GOP and how they're responsible for having steered the ship into the iceberg in the first place. He's been using the "driving the car into a ditch" metaphor in his speeches lately and this should continue on a daily basis between now and November. There should be less of the logical parsing of "facts."
Much as it pains me and most of us (I imagine) to say it, facts don't matter to the voter in the voting booth in a down economy; emotions do. The voter needs someone to blame. Per Knobe and common sense, it's the Dems job between now and November to make the case to the American public that the GOP and every single Tea Party candidate out there is to be blamed for everything that ails our country. It wouldn't be a lie! After we win the mid-terms then it'll be back to governing with the facts and a calm determination.