Signs of Obama’s Grim Re-Election Prospects

The thought of any of the leading Republican presidential candidates occupying the White House come January 2013 is down right terrifying. Indeed, emigrating from the USA might even look like a great pretty great idea if faced with Rick Perry as president and a GOP controlled Congress. Were that to happen, American might be well on the road to a Christianist version of Iran under Islamic extremists. Yet the re-election prospects of Barack Obama are not all that glowing if the economy continues to languish and there is a general sense among voters that things, while still bad, are not improving. I would argue that some of Obama's problems are self-inflicted due to his refusal to act as a leader. Not to mention his continually allowing himself to be rolled by extremists in the GOP. A new piece in Time looks at Obama's re-election prospects and it's not pretty. Here are some highlights:

[T]he Obama team is taking [solace] from the historical examples of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, each of whom won re-election at a time of high unemployment. The idea keeping chins up in the West Wing is that an incumbent president who can credibly argue that things are getting better (and that the other party will make them worse) stands a reasonable chance of surviving a bad economy.

The theory makes sense. And the public is still wary of Republican economic policies. But it’s going to be awfully tough for Obama to make the case for steady improvement under his watch. That became clearer than ever on Thursday, with the latest gloomy economic projections by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The OMB now expects unemployment to average 9% next year, higher than it had previously envisioned, and to stay above seven percent until 2015.

I suppose there’s still time for the economy to start turning the corner in a way that benefits Obama. But there’s still plenty of reason to think things might get worse before they get better, including the seeming Gordian knot of the Euro Zone’s financial crisis, which drags on the global economy and keeps the risk of a 2008-style economic catastrophe hovering in the minds of investors.

If the OMB projection is right, then, and bear in mind that official economic projections have consistently been too rosy since the great crash of 2008, the economy is likely to feel about as stagnant a year from now as it does today. That means the argument that the economy is improving will ring hollow

Which leaves Obama with the negative case, the argument that Republican policies got us into this mess and will only make things worse. . . . . Obama and the Democrats tried that message in the fall of 2010, and it wasn’t nearly enough to save them. The haunting question for Obama is why 2012 will be any different.