When President Obama campaigned in Windham last week, he told the assembled crowd that he is running to restore the middle class, and that he is the only one who can do it. Granite Staters have good reason not to believe that.

The President said it was important for voters to choose him so he can continue his policies to make the middle class stronger. Six days later, the Pew Research Center released a study on the middle class. It found that middle-class incomes grew slowly from 2000 until the 2007 recession and 2008 financial crisis, USA Today reported. Middle-class incomes and wealth have declined since 2007.

President Obama pins 100 percent of the blame for middle-class struggles on President Bush and other Republicans. In Windham, he said he has always maintained that restoring the economy would take more than one term, even more than one President. That is not so. Speaking of the economy, he told ABC News just after he was inaugurated in 2009:

“One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable. You know, I’ve got four years. And, you know, a year from now I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress. But there’s still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

Now he is asking Granite Staters not to hold him accountable, but to blame the President he replaced nearly four years ago. He is asking us to believe that his policies have nothing whatsoever to do with the decline in middle-class income and wealth over the last five years. He is asking us to believe that the policies that have driven the nation $5 trillion further into debt while keeping the unemployment rate above 8 percent for the entire duration of his presidency will somehow start to work as soon as we give him a second term.

Obama surrogate Madeleine Albright said last week that Democrats would continue blaming Bush for the economy “forever.” So at the end of Obama’s second term, when the economy continues to sputter, it will still be Bush’s fault.

Whomever you blame for the events of 2007 and 2008, the idea that we can revive the middle class by continuing the redistributionist policies that have hurt it so badly for the last 42 months is a fantasy.