This year is the third presidential election of 2008.

Oh, sure, it’s 2016. But the financial cataclysm and economic near-depression that slammed us eight years ago haunts us still.

But this time, it’s the leading Democrat who’s getting tripped up by it, not the leading Republican.

The conventional wisdom of the 2008 election is that Barack Obama won because he was just such a special candidate: a black man with a compelling personal story and an uplifting message of hope who inspired record turnout among minorities and young people.

That’s true.

But what’s also true is that the market meltdown of September 2008 obliterated any Republican’s chances.

Like it or not, it was true and it still is: George W. Bush was president when people’s mothers called them in a panic and asked them if they should take their money out of Citibank.

Nine million people began to lose their jobs. Corporate executives called Treasury officials begging for cash to meet payroll.

It didn’t help that John McCain ran back to Washington in a fluster, “suspending” his campaign and trying to delay a debate.

Meanwhile, Obama had already given one level-headed economic speech months before. Introduced by Mayor Mike Bloomberg in downtown Manhattan that March, he called for “a shift in the culture of our financial institutions and our regulatory agencies.”

And in the crisis, he kept his cool. Six weeks later, he made history.

Fast-forward to 2012. Republicans’ strategy was the Reagan strategy: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

People obviously weren’t.

Yet this tack failed. Why?

People could see with their own eyes that Obama hadn’t caused the mess, and that no one could have made it disappear in four years.

Americans had spent the decade before Obama came into office borrowing way more money than they could ever afford to pay back. If you look at the stats, they had spent nearly three decades doing that — back to the Reagan years, when wage growth for the working and middle class stalled out.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney missed chance after chance to try to blunt the fact that in most people’s eyes, he came from the same industry that had stripped middle America of its jobs. He could have said he’d use his insider knowledge to fix this broken industry.

But he didn’t. He never seemed to know he had a problem.

Now, it’s 2016.

The leading Republican is a guy who forces banks to their knees when his casinos go bankrupt.

People like this.

And who has the big 2008 problem? Hillary Clinton.

As everyone knows, Hillary took $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches.

But this isn’t Hillary’s biggest problem. She could fix this in an instant, by giving the money back, or by giving it to people — maybe in Florida! — who lost their homes and their jobs after 2008.

She could say that after having spent the past months talking to people young and old, she understands in a way she didn’t before how deeply the financial crisis affected the country.

She’s learned — and changed.

This isn’t hard.

And she should release the transcripts from those speeches. No, it won’t help her — it’ll only demonstrate that she got paid to say, at best, nothing. She should do it, though, because if she doesn’t, someone else will.

This, too, isn’t hard.

But Hillary can’t do that because she — and her advisers — don’t understand that this is an enduring problem. She seems to think that Bernie Sanders created this climate, not that millions of young voters created him.

And when Sanders says Wall Street’s business model is based on fraud, the establishment titters.

Even Clinton doesn’t seem to grasp that to most people, this is a perfectly moderate statement. Just last week, Morgan Stanley paid a $3.2 billion fine stemming from pre-2008 . . . fraud.

Hillary may squeeze through the primary, as Romney did. But she’ll be weak.

If she wins, it’s only because voters are finally over 2008 — and eight years later, that’s still a risky bet to make.



Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.