Friday’s gloomy jobs report has put President Obama at increasing risk of losing what could be one of the strongest arguments for his reelection: that he turned around an economy in rapid decline and ushered in a vibrant recovery.
U.S. job growth comes to a near halt in June.
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Anemic job growth and a jump in the unemployment rate to 9.2 percent are forcing the White House to prepare for a 2012 campaign that focuses not on what Obama has done to improve the economy, but on what the other side would do to hurt it.
No American president since World War II has been elected with unemployment above 8 percent — which is where Obama’s economists now expect the rate to be in November 2012. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed or don’t have jobs that meet their needs or skills. People are now searching for work longer than they ever have before.
On Thursday, David Plouffe, a senior adviser and the architect of Obama’s 2008 campaign, attempted to downplay the idea that Obama would have to defy history to win reelection.
“People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’” Plouffe said at a breakfast sponsored by Bloomberg News.
Then, he launched into a tirade against Republicans. “All of them are basically just bringing out the same old war horses,” he said. “Let Wall Street kind of run amok, cut taxes for the wealthy, starve investment in things like education, research and development.”
Since the start of his administration, the president and his team have consistently had to reevaluate their view of the economic picture. Early on, they said unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8.2 percent.
When that forecast proved wildly inaccurate by fall 2009, as the jobless rate topped 10 percent, the administration took solace that it was still early and predicted the economy would gain much more steam.
And it appeared to do so until slowing significantly this year. The declining unemployment rate reversed and began to head upward. Reacting to the terrible jobs report for May, Obama described “head winds,” and his team said called it a “speed bump.”
With Friday’s report that the economy added just 18,000 jobs last month — a negligible amount — the head winds are now looking like strong gusts, and the bump appears to be a more of a mountain.
A wide range of economists are reducing their outlook for the rest of the year. The economy needs to add more than 200,000 jobs each month to keep up with the growth of the population.
Obama has been showing more regret lately about the state of the economy.
Speaking in the Rose Garden after the Labor Department report was released Friday morning, he said he recognized that “we still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.”
That followed comments he made earlier this week when he acknowledged that his administration hasn’t been able to come up with a strategy to significantly reduce foreclosures and boost the housing market. He also recently conceded that the stimulus did not create as many new jobs as first anticipated.
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