Time‘s Michael Scherer reports that, in June, “White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair … Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century―Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984―won re­election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. … The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory.”

When FDR took office in March of 1933, unemployment, it’s estimated, was running at about 25 percent. In November 1936, it was down to about 17 percent. GDP growth during FDR’s first term seems to have run at about 7 percent per year.