A response to an unsatisfying answer or to one that is a put-down. Eric Partridge believed this nineteenth-century retort evolved from the proverb ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies, but the two clichés are not identical.

Failing to address economic problems. The phrase was invented by Bill Clinton’s strategist, James Carville, during Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the presidency. Carville suggested Clinton was a better choice for president than George H. W. Bush because Bush had failed to do anything about a recent recession. It hung as a sign on Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. The New York Times writer and Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman used it: “What political scientists . . . tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid” (July 18, 2010). The term not only was repeated enough to become a cliché but gave rise to similar locutions for blame, such as “it’s the voters, stupid” or “it’s the oil spill, stupid.”