President Obama is faced with a tough battle as he tries to kick off a reelection campaign while faced with a weak economy and high unemployment. The president has tried several different tactics to work around this problem, such as a recent weekly address in which he spoke of how the economy is affecting people:
President Obama is right; some people are suffering from a recession still even though technically the long recession ended a few quarters ago. In cities like El Centro and Merced, Calif., unemployment is well over 20%. Meanwhile, in cities such as Lincoln, Nebraska and Bismark, North Dakota, the rate is under 5%.
The fact that red states with more conservative governments tend to have lower unemployment while blue states with hard left governments tend to have higher unemployment is not coincidental.
And as John Hindracker notes at Powerline, blacks have been the hardest hit, with more black men unemployed now than at any time in American history:
Personal recessions can take place in different sectors of the economy as well. President Obama also recently tried to explain why unemployment has been so rough. Jim Geraghty at National Review Online notes:
In truth, government jobs have increased dramatically over the last two years even as public sector jobs have plunged. The image at the top of this piece (click to enlarge) shows this divergent pattern. As you can see, government jobs are fairly recession-proof and have continued to march upward and the only “mass layoffs” were temporary census jobs.
The truth is, almost all of the people suffering from a “personal recession” are people who don’t work for government. President Obama’s position is not hard to work out: he wants to portray cuts in government as bad for the economy and the cause of problems rather than the solution to crushing debt loads that states are staggering under.
It isn’t just the economy that President Obama thinks is hurt by government job losses, either. At that same town hall, President Obama had this to say:
For the president, government jobs are more important than your job for a private company. To him, losing a job at Al’s Hardware isn’t as bad as a bureaucrat losing a job at a trimmed-back government agency.
And this perception is a deep part of the president’s worldview. Look at that quote at the top where he tries to take credit for jobs created under his administration. Putting aside the truth or falsehood of that claim, President Obama says that the government created those jobs. No, M. President, private sector businesses created those jobs despite a hostile business climate and uncertain future.
President Obama is right that people are suffering personal recessions, even if the official economic data says the recession has ended. Where he’s wrong is why and where. Because if he admitted how it came about, why, and where people are hardest hit, that only damages his reelection chances.
