Democratic presidential candidates don’t sound like they believe in the Obama recovery.
The U.S. is “a rigged economy, designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a high-profile speech this month at Liberty University.
Hillary Clinton, at a speech on the economy at the New School in New York, described “an economy that still isn’t delivering for [normal people]. It’s not delivering the way that it should. It still seems, to most Americans that I have spoken with, that it is stacked for those at the top.”
Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, warned in his campaign kickoff speech that “the American Dream seems to be hanging by a thread.”
“The hard truth of our shared reality is this: Unemployment in many American cities and in many small towns across the United States is higher now than it was eight years ago,” O’Malley said, mentioning a time span that coincides with Obama’s tenure as well as with the recovery from the financial crisis. “Conditions of extreme and growing poverty create conditions for extreme violence. We have work to do.”
Even Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, has played up the problems in the U.S.
“I’m hot, I acknowledge that. I’m mad. I’m angry,” Biden said at a Labor Day speech in Pittsburgh, in the midst of speculation that he would enter the primary.
“How many people in your old neighborhoods are in trouble, can look their kids in their eye and say with heart, honey, it’s going to be OK? It’s going to be OK?” Biden asked. “Not enough, because the level playing field doesn’t exist.”
In running for the nation’s top job, Democrats have been forced to criticize the management of their own president and co-partisan, if only implicitly.
They’re competing with Republicans, who have not hesitated to assail Obama’s economic policies and record at all opportunities, including on the campaign trail and in the two presidential debates so far.
The GOP’s rhetoric might be best exemplified by the words of the current poll leader Donald Trump, who declared this summer that “the American Dream is dead.”
Yet the gloomy comments from Democrats present a special problem for the Obama White House, which has sought to defend and promote its economic record this month on the seventh anniversary of the failure of Lehman Bros. and the near-collapse of the financial system.
Republican’s near-apocalyptic rhetoric about the state of the country has garnered more attention, thanks to the size of the field and the high-visibility debates.
But Democrats will have a chance to display their own negativity on Oct. 13, when the first Democratic primary debate is scheduled.
Obama took on the campaign rhetoric directly before a gathering of business executives, saying that “despite the perennial doom and gloom that I guess is inevitably part of a presidential campaign, America is winning right now. America is great right now.”
The aftermath of the recession has meant hardship for millions of Americans, but many metrics show that conditions have improved over the course of the recovery.
Since peaking in 2009, the unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent to 5.1 percent. Fewer people are resorting to part-time jobs when they want full-time work, and fewer people who want work are on the sidelines because they are discouraged about finding a job.
Foreclosures are at the lowest rate since the eve of the recession, and home prices are around their pre-crisis peaks, not accounting for inflation.
One major problem for Americans has been the lack of strong income growth since the recession. The median household earned 6.5 percent less in 2014 than in 2006, according to the Census Bureau’s latest figures. Other statistics, however, suggest that incomes may have grown faster, especially taking safety net programs.
Obama’s advisers have touted these and other statistics in press conferences, blog posts and over social media.
Yet, for the candidate campaigning as an agent of change and promising to turn the government around, it’s easy to write off those statistics.
Sanders has an array of facts and figures in his stump speech that portray the U.S. as in the middle of a crisis.
The socialist has consistently highlighted what he has called the “real unemployment” rate, an alternative measure of underemployment published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside the regular unemployment rate. That “U6” rate, which includes people forced into part-time work and those only sporadically looking for work, is 10.3 percent, more than double the more commonly-cited “U3” rate.
Sanders also refers to soaring unemployment rates for hard-hit groups. Black teenagers, for instance, face 31 percent unemployment.
Having made inequality central to his campaign, Sanders also frequently recites facts about inequality, tying the rise of the 1 percent to “the collapse of the American middle class.”
Such criticisms are appealing to a broad swath of Americans.
Nearly three-quarters of adults believe that government policies since the recession have “done little or nothing to help middle class people,” according to a recent Pew Research poll. Only about a third said they have mostly recovered from the recession.
Similarly, Gallup’s tracking poll showed economic confidence falling throughout the year, with more people saying conditions were bad than good. Across a range of polls, Obama’s approval rating on the economy is negative, with more than half of respondents disapproving.
That puts Obama in a difficult position as his presidency winds down and other politicians take the stage. But he realizes the inevitable. After Sanders and other candidates warned of a larger crisis following a stock market correction in August, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the episode “illustrates the difference between campaigning and governing.”
“That doesn’t mean that they’re doing anything wrong,” he said. “It just means that they have a different job.”
This article appears in the Sept. 28 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
