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Obama campaigns again

This time for economy and his legacy
President Barack Obama speaks about the economy, on Friday during a news conference in the White House in Washington. From the State of the Union address to campaign-style speeches in Detroit and Omaha, Obama is trying to persuade Americans to take a sunnier view of the U.S. economy, hoping to burnish his own legacy, dispel the gloom being spread by Republican presidential hopefuls and nasty stock markets in 2016.

President Barack Obama is fond of saying he has run his last campaign, often to suggest that he feels liberated to act without worrying about the political consequences. But lately the president sounds as if he’s still in campaign mode, especially when he talks about the economy.

“The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world,” Obama said Friday, taking credit for the latest job figures and promoting the budget he will unveil Tuesday. “I know that’s still inconvenient for Republican stump speeches as their doom-and-despair tour plays in New Hampshire. I guess you cannot please everybody.”

From the State of the Union address to campaign-style speeches in Detroit, Omaha and Baton Rouge, Obama is trying to jawbone Americans into taking a sunnier view of the U.S. economy, hoping to burnish his own legacy, dispel the gloom being spread by Republican presidential hopefuls and give this year’s Democratic candidates a timely boost.

And so far Democrats are welcoming the president’s efforts. Rep. Brad Ashford, D-Neb., happily joined Obama on Air Force One for a trip to Omaha, and Louisiana’s newly elected governor, John Bel Edwards, met the president at the airport in Baton Rouge. Both Democratic presidential hopefuls, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have praised Obama’s record.

That is different from two years ago, when the economy and Obama’s handling of it still seemed a political liability to some candidates, and many Democrats were treating the president like a pariah.

Just four days before the midterm election in 2014, Obama paid a visit to the campus of Rhode Island College to discuss the still-weak economic recovery and the role of women in the economy.

Yet Obama did not mention the state’s most prominent woman Democrat, State Treasurer Gina Raimondo, a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate, who was his party’s gubernatorial nominee. Rhode Island’s unemployment rate was still at more than 7 percent, and Raimondo was locked in a tight race for governor. She took a seat at the college field house some distance away from the president and, on her way out, declared the visit was not a campaign event. Instead, she and Obama made a stop at a pub in Providence. Raimondo would go on to win a close three-way contest with 40 percent of the vote, but the Democratic anxiety over the economy never subsided during that election season.

“It was a mistake to shun the president and disown the progress in 2014 because candidates got all the downside and none of the upside,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s former political strategist.

This year looks different.

“The more that President Obama talks about his economic progress this year, the better for Democrats up and down the ticket in November,” said Meredith Kelly, spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “These efforts will have an important impact on the Democratic brand and what it means for growing our economy.” She added: “His activity will also help emphasize that Democrats must be elected in order to continue his forward progress.”

But this is no slam dunk. On the one hand, the economy has added 14 million jobs over a record 71 consecutive months, the unemployment rate has dropped from a peak of 10 percent in October 2009 to less than 5 percent, and average household wages have picked up, growing 2.5 percent last year.

But inequality, uncertainty and anxiety have tempered Obama’s ratings. A Rasmussen Reports survey in late January showed 62 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. And volatile global stock markets at the end of 2015 and so far in 2016 and China’s slowing growth have raised fears that the already sluggish U.S. recovery might slow even further.

Moreover, median wages, adjusted for inflation, have only just climbed back to where they were at the beginning of the Great Recession, when Obama took office. Average wages have grown faster than median wages, a reflection of growing, not shrinking, inequality. And until the past couple of months, people have been dropping out of the labor force – partly a demographic phenomenon but much of it unexplained.

Consumer sentiment, while good, still falls short of the second Bill Clinton term and stands slightly lower than it did in January 2015. And Gallup polls show that in 2015 Americans felt pretty good about current conditions but were less confident about the future of the economy.

Among post-World War II presidents, only two – George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush – have presided over lower average growth rates for real GDP. (Obama’s record here is weighed down by the financial crisis already in progress when he took office.) And the Obama recovery has been a choppy one, with real GDP growth stumbling to 0.7 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year after a lackluster third quarter.

Ray C. Fair, a Yale University economist, has used economic performance to predict presidential election outcomes with a high degree of accuracy. His model currently shows Democrats losing “by a fairly large amount.”

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last month showed that 50 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s handling of the economy, while 46 percent disapprove, hardly overwhelming but still the best margin for Obama in Post-ABC polls since 2009.

The president seems to think the lack of stronger support is partly a matter of perception, and he’s taken special aim at the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates.

“They’re peddling fiction during a political season. It’s strange to watch people try to outdo each other in saying how bad things are,” Obama said during a January visit to Detroit, home of the rejuvenated automobile industry. “When one says the economy’s terrible, the next says it’s terrible and on fire and covered in bees. And they’ll just come up with stuff. They’re racing to see who can talk down America the most.”

On Friday at the White House, Obama suggested that one reason people aren’t more positive might be a “hangover” from the recession.

“The challenge always has been that the economy has improved, but the long term stagnancy of wages, now decades long and exacerbated by the recession, continues,” Axelrod said in an email before the latest jobs figures.

“We were in free fall in ‘09. The economy had shrunk by 8.9 percent the quarter before Obama took office - the worst quarter since 1930. The country lost 800,000 jobs the month he took office. Unemployment was on its way up to over 10 percent,” Axelrod added. “Today, it’s at five. We’ve had the longest run of job growth in history.”



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