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As the 2012 general election was blossoming into full flower, Gallup asked voters who was most to blame for the sorry state of the U.S. economy: Incumbent President Barack Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush.

It was, in a way, the essential question about Obama’s reelection hopes. The economy was gaining ground, but only barely. The postrecession rebound that had seemed to be well underway at the end of 2009 had fizzled and then vanished. In the reelection year, the recovery had resumed, but only in anemic fashion, and would eventually end with actual economic contraction by the final quarter of 2012.

That’s a recipe for a one-term presidency right there. Unless he was being graded on a curve…

It might seem odd now that Gallup pollsters were still asking about the former president nearly four years after he left office, but not in context. The incumbent’s argument was that Republicans deserved the blame for the financial panic of 2008 and what was then being called the Great Recession that followed. Obama, he said, was just cleaning up their mess.

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Remember the car in the ditch? That was Obama’s well-tortured metaphor for how he said Republicans had wrecked the economy and were actively impeding his efforts to get the engine of American prosperity back on the road. So when Gallup asked in mid-June 2012 whether Obama or Bush deserved the blame, it was a good test of the Democrat’s chances in the fall.

Six months after Obama took office, Americans still overwhelmingly blamed Bush, with 80 percent of respondents saying the 43rd president deserved “a great deal or a moderate amount of blame,” compared with 32 percent for Obama. That may be understandable for a honeymoon period. But what happened next is more interesting.

As the years rolled on, the share of people blaming Obama climbed up to about 50 percent, but stayed there. The share blaming Bush slackened a bit but was still a very robust 68 percent as Republican Mitt Romney, a businessman promising to engineer an economic turnaround, started his attack on Obama’s record.

Team Obama had not been able to deliver the strong, stable growth they had promised, but performed a political miracle. They took credit for saving the country and the world from a crippling global depression but avoided the blame for a recovery that continued to disappoint. Those were the days when jobs could either be “saved or created,” a metric that constantly asked voters to imagine how much worse things might have been.

And it mostly worked. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with both the economy and with Obama’s signature health insurance program, he won a decisive victory over Romney. The campaign’s tagline spoke to its backward glance: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”

So can Joe Biden be to inflation for Donald Trump and the GOP as Bush was to recession for Obama?

The news this week on inflation has been grim. Real grim. While the economy continues to grow at a pretty stout rate and unemployment remains at rock-bottom levels, the prices for almost everything continue to climb. Some level of inflation is a byproduct of economic growth, but when it exceeds the benefits of that growth, voters revolt.

And when Americans expect prices to rise, as they very much do right now, it tends to cause sellers to charge more and workers to seek more in payment for their services. Fear of inflation can cause inflation itself. What makes this New Year’s surge in prices so concerning is that the pace of price increases had been slackening for months, until September of 2024, when it ticked back up. January was the fourth straight month to see the rate of price increases climb. At 3 percent, we’re now getting outside of what’s considered tolerable in a growing economy.

Ulp.

The White House is going straight to the Obama playbook (and not just on dealing with unfriendly reporters). “The Biden........

© The Hill