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Josh Marshall at TPM: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archive...more?ref=fpblg

A new Bloomberg poll shows a plurality of people say they're worse off today under President Obama than they were under President Bush.

That captures a key difficulty for President Obama, to put it mildly.

Factually, those numbers are hardly surprising. I'm almost surprised they're not worse. Factually speaking, lots of people are demonstrably worse off today than they were through almost all the Bush years. We're going on three years of historically high unemployment.

On the other hand, the reason for that is that there was a massive economic crisis at the tail end of President Bush's second term and unemployment skyrocketed. So it's just as demonstrably the result of things that happened before President Obama was president. So, yes, things are terrible. But it's not President Obama's fault. That's factual but doesn't have a lot of rhetorical traction going on three years into a severe economic downturn. Especially if the president cannot show clear evidence that the economy is an upturn, albeit from a very low starting point.