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Improving job numbers a boost for Obama
“A lot of families are still having a tough time. A lot of small businesses are still having a tough time,” he said. “But we’re starting to rebound. We’re moving in the right direction. We have made real progress.”
Still, Obama is likely to face the highest unemployment rate on Election Day of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A key to his re-election will be whether the economy can sustain the encouraging hiring trend. Time and again, David Axelrod, his top political adviser, has said the actual unemployment number is not as important as the trajectory.
Consider Jimmy Carter, who lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan as unemployment climbed from 6 percent in October 1979 to 7.5 percent in October of the 1980 election year. Likewise, George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992 in the midst of rising unemployment, which went from 6.9 percent September 1991 to 7.6 percent in September 1992.
Reagan managed to get re-elected in 1984 even though unemployment stood at 7.4 percent in October of that year. The difference was that his unemployment trend line had been dropping since the spring of 1983.
For Obama, the positive trend is hardly pure economic sunshine.
While employers added 200,000 in December, economists say that at that pace it would take about seven years to return the unemployment rate to pre-recession levels. And the number is still higher than when Obama took office.
What’s more, the economy appeared to be on the rebound last spring only to tumble.
“The public has seen green shoots before that haven’t proved to be good omens of things to come,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “This has to keep going before it pays political dividends.”
Republicans seeking to challenge Obama for the White House kept up their economic criticism Friday even as they acknowledged an improved jobs picture. The president’s policies, they said, rather than being a cause for greater employment, have impeded faster growth.
