In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan encouraged voters to ask themselves, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Today, Barack Obama was asked a similar question by the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis--"If he felt that we were better off today than we were four years ago..."
"Well, you know, I think that we are better off now than we would have been if I hadn't taken all the steps that we took," President Obama replied.
Interestingly, the president's answer today seems to contradict a statement he made last month:
"Well I don’t think they are better off than they were four years ago," Obama said in reference to the American people on October 3. "They’re not better off than they were before Lehman’s collapse, before the financial crisis, before this extraordinary recession that we’re going through."