Obama is Staying on Course, Despite Everything

Barack Obama received more economic bad news last week: American growth has progressed at an even slower rate than was predicted in the spring. Gross domestic product went down from 1.7 to 1.3 percent, annualized from April to June, according to a new estimate from the Department of Commerce.

These are the kinds of fundamentals that do not bode well for the president’s re-election. New employment figures in the United States, which will be announced Friday, are unlikely to change the picture of an economy struggling to take off.

However, Barack Obama continues to defy gravity. Over the course of the past three weeks he has taken off, leading Mitt Romney in polls across the country and in key states for the 2012 presidential election. If the election were held today rather than Nov. 6, he would be considered the favorite.

Luckily for the Republican candidate, there are still 36 days left in the campaign. The three presidential debates — the first of which will take place Thursday [sic] at the University of Denver — could permit him to regain the lead.

That said, Barack Obama has a good chance of becoming the first president to be re-elected to the White House despite an unemployment rate of more than 8 percent. In 1980, when American voters showed Jimmy Carter the door, the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent.

How can we explain the advances made by the Democratic candidate, even though the main economic signs should be announcing his defeat? The answer has a bit to do with Mitt Romney, no doubt. The former governor of Massachusetts has difficulty both establishing contact with voters and explaining to them his proposals for reviving the economy.

It seems that choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate has not helped his cause. The representative from Wisconsin is proposing a budget plan that involves important changes to Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly. These changes are unpopular with voters and are contributing to Barack Obama’s advances in at least three key states — Florida, Ohio and Virginia — according to a poll taken for the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In addition, there is the secret video in which Mitt Romney expresses to wealthy donors his contempt for the 47 percent of Americans who do not pay taxes. In the course of the past two weeks, the Obama camp has released three devastating ads exploiting the remarks of the Republican candidate on the “47 percent.” “I will never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” the multimillionaire candidate can be heard saying in the most recent of these ads, while images are shown of ordinary Americans — including veterans, workers, men, women, whites, blacks and Latinos — who don’t earn enough money to have to pay income tax.

Mitt Romney will never come back from these ads, but Barack Obama had begun to increase his lead over his Republican rival even before the broadcast of this secret video by the monthly magazine Mother Jones.

Following the Democratic convention, polls began to show an advantage for him in terms of economy, a subject hitherto dominated by Romney.

Since then, other surveys have also indicated that the majority of voters were convinced by one of the main arguments made by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton during their speeches at the Democratic convention: The pace of recovery may be unsatisfactory, but the economy is improving or will improve if we give the president’s policies more time to show results.

It also appears that voters have a more nuanced judgment of their country’s economy than many pundits do. At least that’s the opinion of Ron Brownstein, who last week gave a detailed analysis of surveys conducted for the National Journal. Here is an important quote: “Many Americans feel the economy is experiencing fundamental changes beyond the reach of any president to reshape quickly, or perhaps at all. Although some respondents said they believed that the 2012 election would determine the level of opportunity available for future generations, many others said that the nation’s economic trials reflect problems that have accumulated over time and are unlikely to be resolved soon.”

That’s where the patience that voters seem to have for Obama comes from.