Obama en manos de la economía

Artículo del Washington Post sobre el impacto de la economía en las perspectivas de reelección de Obama:

Will Barack Obama’s fate be written in the numbers?

A 513-point plunge for the Dow, followed a day later by a drop in the nation’s credit rating.

Home values worth one-third less than they were five years ago.

The share of working-age Americans in the labor force — at just 58 percent — lower than it has been since 1983.

Growth under 2 percent, so sluggish that a second dip into recession looks distinctly possible.

That kind of economic data amounts to a formidable headwind for any incumbent president hoping for a second term. And Democrats are worried that time could be running out to change the direction of the gale.

“The good news for the president is that the election isn’t taking place today,” said Democratic strategist Mark Mellman. “But if people look forward and see what they see today, it’s going to be difficult. The most important thing to do is change the circumstances on the ground, and that’s also the hardest thing to do.”

Campaigning in last year’s midterm elections, Obama argued over and over again that Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch; from now going forward, the question will be why he hasn’t towed it out.

If past elections are any indication, strategists and political scientists say, Obama has a limited amount of time — perhaps until next summer — to do that.

By the final months leading up to an election, voters have already decided how they feel about the outlook, said Robert J. Shapiro, who was the top economic adviser to Bill Clinton in his 1992 presidential campaign. He currently heads an economic consulting firm.

(...) Exactly what Obama could do to change the course at this point, however, is difficult to figure out.

The political exigency of cutting government spending, which drove the debt-ceiling negotiations that took the country to the brink of default, runs exactly counter to what many economists say would help boost economic growth in the short run.

So the president is left arguing for measures that could help around the edges in the near term — such as extending the payroll tax cut and emergency unemployment benefits that are set to expire in December.

One worrisome sign for Obama: In only two presidential election years since the early 1950s have the consumer confidence indexes been as low as they are today. Those two years were 1980 and 1992, which also happen to have been the only two when an elected incumbent was defeated.

(...) Scholars have found correlations between a president’s economic performance and his electoral one.

One that has gotten wide credence among political scientists is the so-called “Bread and Peace” model designed by Douglas Hibbs of the University of Gothenberg in Sweden, which finds that a president’s reelection prospects are tied to growth in disposable income and the number of military casualties resulting from U.S.-initiated foreign conflicts.

“If I had to bet today,” Hibbs said, “I’d bet that he will lose.”

Ray Fair, a Yale University economics professor who has developed another well-known model for predicting election outcomes, has also grown more pessimistic about Obama’s prospects.

“He’s got to get going pretty quickly,” Fair said. “Other than working on the payroll tax, he’s probably not going to be able to do much between now and the election to affect the economy, as a practical matter.” (...)