Will The Unemployment Rate Doom Obama's Reelection?
Posted Dec 07, 2010 at 12:07 PM by Maurice Berger
This analysis from Jeff Madrick via Frank Rich via, in The New York Times, should make the Democrats worry, re: the President's reelection chances in 2012: "As the economics commentator Jeff Madrick wrote in The Huffington Post, the unemployment rate has been above 7 percent only four times in a presidential election year since World War II — and in three of the four the incumbent lost (Ford, Carter, the first Bush). Reagan did win in 1984 with an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, but the rate was falling rapidly (from a high of 10.8 two years earlier) . . . But as Madrick adds, there has never been a sitting president over that period who has had to run with an unemployment rate as high as 8 percent — which is precisely where the Fed’s most recent forecasts predict the rate could be mired when Obama faces the voters again in 2012."
