Unemployment Blues

Unemployment figures came out today, a sober reminder our country has deep economic problems made all the more intractable by the inability of both major parties to get along to reach bi-partisan remedies. Democrats generally believe more government spending is needed to stimulate the economy; Republicans believe business will invest more and create more jobs once the federal government reins in spending.

Thursday’s “economic memo” in the NY Times by Binyamin Appelbaum starkly described Barack Obama’s challenge as he faces re-election. The lead paragraph summed up his problem: “No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/business/economy/02jobs.html?_r=1&ref=politics)

Unemployment today is 9.1% nationally. It is not expected to drop sharply in the next 18 months.

Which means the election will turn on whether Americans vote with their brains or their emotions. They’ll have to remember under whose presidential watch we tumbled into the worst recession since the Depression. They’ll have to decide if it’s better to place the nation’s future back into the hands of the party that put us into deep water in the first place with two wars, a Medicare prescription reimbursement program that was not sustainable and a tax cut for the wealthy, or if it’s more satisfying to blame the current occupant of the White House for failing to reverse eight years of destructive policies in four years. Our widening national debt is an emotionally charged issue, yet, as Stephen Colbert noted last night, Republicans pushed through a higher debt ceiling during the Bush presidency in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007 and twice in 2008.

Let’s be honest. Obama’s policies have not been sufficient to turn the economic tide. He should have demanded more government money to stimulate the economy. Without the stimulus plan and TARP that Bush and Obama implemented, we’d be in worse shape. GM and Chrysler might be history, and with them many suppliers to the auto industry. Unemployment would be significantly higher. We’d have negative economic output, according to many economists.

Yet many Republicans, including their presidential hopefuls, say the stimulus program was a disaster. Obama needs to forcefully defend the program.

It will be up to the electorate to make sense of these countervailing claims.

If Applebaum is correct, Obama has little chance of staying in the White House beyond noon, January 20, 2012. But using the national unemployment rate of 9.1% could be misleading. As past Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to say, “All politics is local.” So let’s examine unemployment layered onto the electoral map of 2008.

Obama won 27 states and the District of Columbia in 2008. Of those blue states, only seven—Maryland, Minnesota, Hawaii, Iowa, Virginia, Vermont and New Hampshire—currently enjoy an unemployment rate below the 7.2% threshold. Another six—New York, Massachusetts, Maine, New Mexico Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—are close.

Of those 13 states, Minnesota, Virginia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania can be said to be “in play” because Obama’s margin of victory over John McCain was less than, or barely above, 10% and there have been rightward shifts in voter sentiment since the 2008 election.

Moreover, Obama’s fortunes are more precarious in the following states he barely won last time: Florida (by 2.5%), North Carolina (0.4%), Colorado (8.6%), Ohio (4%) and Indiana (0.9%).

All in all, it suggests the potential for a vastly different Electoral College map than when Obama won 365 votes to McCain’s 173 (270 are required).

It’s still a long way off until November 2012. The Republican field of candidates is far from stellar. The GOP might overplay its hand, as it appears to have done with a plan to overhaul Medicare. Its plan was widely considered the reason Republicans lost an upstate New York special congressional election last week. The lesson Democrats need to take from that election is they must draw strong distinctions between what they stand for and the impact Republican programs would place on the American family.

Obama’s task is much harder than four years ago. Harder, but not impossible.

(Editor’s note: I’m not the only one to react to Applebaum’s premise. Here’s Nate Silver of the NY Times with his thoughts: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/on-the-maddeningly-inexact-relationship-between-unemployment-and-re-election/?scp=2&sq=nate%20silver&st=cse.)