US economy - When Will It Turn?
The more important point question Democrats are asking themselves: when will the trend turn? When will Obama be able to argue that he has created jobs -- or a single job? The problem is that the unemployment rate is a big political number, and a rate that exceeds 10.0 -- another artificial level -- is tough. Democrats worry that if the UI rate isn't down substantially by the time voters make up their minds -- roughly, a year from now, mid-summer, 2010, their party will suffer. It's one thing to say that voters don't blame Democrats for the UI rate now -- they don't -- and it's entirely another to presume that voters won't be angrier at the slow pace of progress by this time next year. True, the administration's top economic thinkers, like Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, projected a much different pathway for the unemployment rate. But so did private forecasters, who are able to quietly revise their forecasts weekly. It's clear that the Obama economic brain trust did not anticipate how bad January and February would be. Then again, few policy-makers, economists or otherwise, did.
If Democrats lose their cool and their patience, they could wind up hurting themselves even more. Democratic panic will turn the economy into a political weapon that Republicans can use against the Democrats.
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