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It's Not 'Morning in America'
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 3:38PM There is good news and bad news for President Obama in the latest economic reports. The bad news is all too obvious. Gas prices are sky high. Houses are not selling. Job creation is slowing. And the unemployment rate is inching back up – to 9.1% for May.
The good news is that the economy, at least in terms of the unemployment rate, is still better than it was in May 1983, 18 months before Ronald Reagan scored his landslide re-election victory.
The economy in the early 1980s is not a bad operating model for the present. In the spring of 1983, the unemployment rate was still above 10%, but had come down nearly a full percentage point from November 1982. And over the next year and a half, it would decline further to 7.2% at the time of the 1984 election.
That was still the highest election-time unemployment rate since World War II for any incumbent president who has gone on to win reelection. But it was the two-year, pre-election trend line that was politically important – downward in terms of the unemployment rate, upwards in terms of other economic measurements. This enabled Reagan to effectively campaign in 1984 on the theme: “It’s morning in America.”
It is a mantra that Obama cannot reprise - at least, not yet. The economic recovery during Reagan’s first term also had its ups and downs. In three separate months between the November 1982 midterm election and the November 1984 presidential election, there was an uptick in the unemployment rate just as there was from April to May this year.
The first jump came in the summer of 1983, when the rate went up from 9.4% to 9.5%. The other two hikes, to Reagan’s benefit, came in the latter half of 1984, when the sense of recovery had already taken hold.
At no time, though, in the two years leading up to his reelection did Reagan have to weather back-to-back months of increasing unemployment rates that might have changed the tenor of the 1984 campaign. At this point, that would be the real danger for Obama, the development of a negative economic trend line that would harden the sense of a failed recovery.
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