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Can a president control gas prices? Depends on when you ask. By Rich Morin, a senior editor focusing on social and demographic trends at Pew Research Center. Excerpt:
"For example, when Republican George W. Bush was in the White House in May 2006, and
gas prices were spiking,
CBS News and the New York Times asked this poll question: “Is the price
of gasoline something a president can do a lot about, or is that beyond
any president’s control?”
About 71% of all Democrats said presidents
could do a lot to rein in gas prices. Six years later Democrat Barack
Obama was president, and CBS/New York Times repeated the same question
in their March survey. This time, 42% of Democrats said the president
had the power to influence the price of gasoline — fully 29 percentage
points fewer than those holding that view when Bush was president.
The shift was not quite so big among
Republicans: 54% in the Bush-era survey said the president had power
over gas prices, while about 69% expressed this view in March of 2012, a
15-point difference.
“Our ability to perceive and interpret gas
prices and presidential responsibility is the tool of our partisanship,
not so much determined by our economic theories,” concluded a
blog post by political
scientist Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin, who is
currently a visiting professor at Marquette University.
For serious students of politics like
Franklin, such partisan flip-flops are not surprising. They call it the
“partisan filter” effect. Partisan filters — some might call them
blinders — shape the way that Republicans and Democrats see many aspects
of the world.
Take, for example, views on the overall
economy. Certainly the basic facts on the ground are the same: the
unemployment rate, changes in the cost of living, the latest reading on
the Gross Domestic Product. But the judgments based on the same data
often are strikingly different.
For example, during Republican
presidencies, GOP partisans give more favorable evaluations to the
performance of the economy than do Democrats — and vice versa when a
Democrat calls the shots from the White House.
In the latest
Pew Research Center poll, Republicans were about twice as likely as Democrats to rate economic conditions as “poor” (49% vs. 26%).
But back in September 2007, with the
country poised on the brink of the Great Recession and Republican Bush
in the White House, just the opposite was true: Democrats were about
twice as likely as GOP partisans to say the economy was on the ropes
(34% vs. 17%)."
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