Salon - Now it's official: Obama is another Reagan

Friday, Oct 8, 2010 10:32 ET

Now it's official: Obama is another Reagan

By Steve Kornacki

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/10/08/obama_unemployment_midterms/index.html



The monthly jobs report released this morning should pretty much seal Democrats' midterm election fate. There will be no more reports between now and November 2, so today's data essentially represents the final pre-election word on the status of the American economy. And as my colleague Andrew Leonard wrote earlier, the combination of 9.6 percent unemployment, paltry private sector growth, and alarming layoffs at the state and local government levels (the result of federal austerity) means that "the incumbent party is going to pay the price in a few weeks."

Today's report immediately calls to mind the final pre-election data before the first midterm of Ronald Reagan's presidency, which was released in the first week of October 1982. I've long argued that Reagan's first two years in office provide a nice parallel to Obama's. Both men came to office under similar circumstances and both initially enjoyed stratospheric popularity, with most Americans badly wanting to believe that their new president could and would fix their woes. In this sense, the "stunning" decline in Obama's political standing these past 20 months is no surprise at all. The same thing happened to Reagan, and for the same reason: a seemingly intractable recession that raised economic anxiety to levels not seen in decades. It didn't matter that Reagan tried to turn on his charm and reassure Americans with promises that his program would soon turn the tide. As unemployment climbed, voters tuned him out.

For Reagan, the final nail in his party's midterm coffin came with the final pre-election unemployment report, which showed -- for the first time since the Great Depression -- joblessness reaching over 10 percent. He tried mightily to put a positive spin on the data (noting, for instance, that the economy was showing positive growth), but almost no one in the media or the general public was willing to buy in. It's jarring, in fact, to go back and read the coverage that surrounded the release of that '82 jobs report; the same dispiriting conclusions that experts are now drawing about why this recession is so different (and worse) than previous recessions were drawn back then, too. Consider this passage from a New York Times story in early October '82; tweak a few names and numbers, and it could just as easily be written today:



That was the environment that caused Reagan's party to suffer a drubbing in the next month's midterm elections -- a drubbing that was immediately followed by months of speculation about whether Reagan would decide not to run again in 1984 (and whether he'd be challenged in the GOP primaries if he did).