Duh: Economy Tops Campaign Agenda

The front page of today's Washington Post confirms my New Year's Day analysis: the economy has surpassed health care as the number one domestic issue for American voters. According to exit polls in New Hampshire, it even exceeded Iraq or terrorism as a concern, and that was for Democrats and Republicans alike.

It's always nice to be ahead of the pack. And, in hindsight, I'm sorry I didn't draw the obvious conclusion from this shift in opinion. Growing fears about the economy undoubtedly contributed to Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire. It wasn't just women who rescued her candidacy, but voters lower down on the income scale, who turned out in droves along with every other constituency.

Why would these voters stampede to Clinton? Was it race (distaste for Barack Obama), as so many pundits have suggested? Actually, they were already there. Over the past 30 years, the only time the lower middle-class registered real (higher than inflation) gains in their take home pay was in the latter half of Bill Clinton's time in office. When it comes to economic matters, the name "Clinton" is a proven brand.

The increasing likelihood of a full blown recession this year should benefit whomever is the Democratic nominee. Their roughly comparable approaches on fiscal stimulus, tax breaks, and regulatory policy will offer voters a sharp break from the Republican mantra of tax breaks uber alles, deregulation, and "you're own your own" economics that led us into this fix.

Yet as I flipped through the op-ed pages of the nation's leading newspapers over the past few days and read the political commentary in the wake of New Hampshire's "upset," I've yet to read one pundit who has addressed the centrality of the deteriorating economy to the emerging dynamics of the race. "Populism" as a response to "middle-class anxiety" is as close as anyone gets. But that's John Edwards' 2007 formulation in the context of a still surging economy. Look where that has gotten him. And after New Hampshire, all the pundits can write about is the tear and the sneer and the woman and the black, as if the voter at the margin who considers such issues after endless television gazing is all the matters.

Frankly, I think they should take all the pundits' columns away, give them notebooks and microphones, and send them off to the boondocks to do some real reporting. They might learn something from the people.