Understanding the Obama camp's 'hair of the dog' expression

To rebut Mitt Romney's comparison of today's jobs report to a "hangover" for Democrats, the Obama campaign is using another drunken expression: "The hair of the dog."

"If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover," Romney said in a statement. Last night was the final night of the Democratic convention wherein Barack Obama accepted his party's nomination for president.

Jennifer Psaki, Obama's traveling press secretary, responded to Romney while speaking with press aboard Air Force One today. Per a pool report:

"... I noticed in their statement that they referenced last night was like a party and today is like a hangover -- I'm getting it a little wrong.  If you go with Mitt Romney's and his team's approach to the economy, their approach is like going back to the hair of the dog, as they say in the bar scenes, and going back to the same policies that led us to the crisis that we've been going through to begin with, that has not worked.  And we know they haven't worked because we've seen this movie before.  And he had the opportunity to lay out his plan last week and really just didn’t do that."

Never having heard this expression, I looked it up for you in America's No. 1 source for credible information: Wikipedia.

"Hair of the dog" is an old expression "used to refer to alcohol that is consumed with the aim of lessening the effects of a hangover." Wikipedia says the original expression "referred to a method of treatment of a rabid dog bite by placing hair from the dog in the bite wound."

In short, hair of the dog means doing the same thing that caused harm with the expectation that it will have the reverse effect.

And now you know.