When US President Barack Obama addressed members of the Democratic National Committee in Washington over the weekend, he offered a glowing account of the economic recovery under his administration.
“America is coming back,” he said after rattling off an array of upbeat economic indicators. “We’ve risen from recession.”
However, as both parties begin positioning themselves for the election to succeed Obama, the politics of the economy are far more complicated than the president would have them. Among Democrats, there are divisions over the degree to which former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, considered their leading contender, should praise the recovery and run on Obama’s stewardship of the economy, while Republicans — assessing falling unemployment and soaring job creation under a president with still-mediocre approval ratings — are grasping for the right way to frame their campaign message next year.
Illustration: Mountain people
The coming debate over the economy, and by extension Obama’s legacy, is a particularly acute topic for governors, who are often judged by voters on their states’ economic performance and who spend much of their time on job creation. As the governors gathered in Washington for their annual winter meeting, there was bipartisan optimism about the economy, but it was guarded.
“In many parts of the country, we are seeing increasing momentum in terms of recovery, but in almost every state, and certainly in parts of Colorado, we are still struggling to get the unemployment down, and most importantly, the wages still haven’t started rising,” Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper said.
Colorado’s unemployment rate was down to 4 percent in December last year, below the national average, which was 5.7 percent last month, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, Hickenlooper’s sober analysis suggests an awareness that voters are not yet enjoying a boon and certainly are not yet fully crediting Obama for the recovery.
Indeed, a Quinnipiac University poll in Colorado, a crucial swing state, released last week indicated that 58 percent of voters said they wanted the next president to “change direction from Barack Obama’s policies,” and the president’s job approval rating was at only 43 percent.
Perhaps mindful of such data, Hickenlooper, a Democrat, indicated that Clinton could not run simply on the recent good economic news.
“I am not saying who the candidate is going to be, but I don’t think she will come with: ‘Everything is fine, everything is going well,’” he said. “I suspect that she will come forward with some new ideas and some innovative ideas on how we can begin to move wages up and how we can help businesses expand more rapidly and create more jobs.”
Yet in another important state on the presidential map, the Democratic governor said Clinton should not be shy about linking herself to Obama’s record.
“She should embrace the Obama economic policies that have moved the country forward, absolutely,” said Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Clinton and former US president Bill Clinton. “Go through the numbers, look where we are today. Things are booming.”
However, McAuliffe was quick to add that Obama could make it easier for Hillary Rodham Clinton to offer that embrace if his administration were more effective in trumpeting the recovery.
“I think they need to do a much better job of explaining their successes,” said McAuliffe, who was the chairman of Hilary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “I don’t get it.”
What most of the governors, in both parties, agreed on was that long-standing wage stagnation was diminishing the political impact of the recovery.
“We still have a wage problem. We are still creating too many low-wage, not family-supporting, jobs,” said Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, a Democrat who was elected last year in a state that was among the hardest hit by the recession.
Raimondo, whose state has a 6.8 percent unemployment rate, added: “So there is a lot of work to do. She has a wage problem that she has to fix.”
The country’s structural economic challenges — whether wages, diminished manufacturing or other challenges associated with globalization — are such that Clinton must come up with her own agenda, said Delaware Governor Jack Markell, another Democrat.
“I think it would be a mistake for somebody to be running on: ‘It’s great guns; we just have to keep doing what we’re doing,’” Markell said. “It ought to be: ‘In a changing world, here are the things we need to do differently.’”
Early signs suggest that Hillary Rodham Clinton intends to offer proposals that would move beyond Obama’s ideas — notably a plan to offer incentives to corporations that increase profit-sharing with employees.
If Democrats are grappling with how best to hail the resurgent economy while acknowledging its underlying difficulties, Republicans are engaged in a conversation over whether they should remain critical of the recovery, claim a share of credit for it or move on to different issues.
Many of the Republican governors from states that have seen significant economic improvement on their watch are uneasy about their nominee continuing to bad-mouth the economy.
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, whose state has seen unemployment drop to 4.1 percent, said Republican presidential candidates should point to job growth in Republican-led states.
“Take some credit for what Republican governors have done, because the recipe to revitalize the national economy is to do the same thing,” Branstad said.
He also suggested that Republicans ought to focus on national security, an issue on which Obama may prove to be more vulnerable than the economy.
To The Honorable Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜): We would like to extend our sincerest regards to you for representing Taiwan at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on Monday. The Taiwanese-American community was delighted to see that Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan speaker not only received an invitation to attend the event, but successfully made the trip to the US. We sincerely hope that you took this rare opportunity to share Taiwan’s achievements in freedom, democracy and economic development with delegations from other countries. In recent years, Taiwan’s economic growth and world-leading technology industry have been a source of pride for Taiwanese-Americans.
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