In this regard, Obama will provide full support for the Democratic nominee for the presidential election of 2020. The same thing worries Trump and his entourage. On the other hand, news and statistics on the performance of Obama and Trump and a comparison of these two have raised the White House's concerns.
Trump is falling almost 1 million Jobs Short Vs. Obama
As Forbes reported, The US Bureau of Labor announced that the economy added 224,000 jobs in June vs. expectations of 160,000 and May’s revised result of 72,000. The 224,000 is still strong, but there were revisions to April and May that subtracted 11,000 people hired in those months and government employment added 33,000. Overall private payrolls added 191,000 employees.The stock markets are reacting negatively due to the jobs number being stronger than expected since investors are lowering their expectations that the Fed will cut interest rates by 50 basis points later this month. A 25 basis point downward move is still being priced into the market, but that may wind up being optimistic due to the strong report.
Over 29 months Obama added almost 1 million more jobs than Trump
Trump entered office on January 20, 2017, and starting with February 2017 he has been President for 29 months. Total job growth during that time has been 5.613 million or 194,000 per month with those results being helped by the tax cut. Working back from January 2017, Obama’s last month in office, there had been 6.423 million jobs added or 221,000 per month. The difference for the 29 months is 810,000 more jobs or 27,000 more per month than Trump. Note that back in January this year the total difference was only 194,000, which means over the past five months it has increased by 616,000. And looking at the next six months with Obama’s job numbers of 188,000 to 327,000 per month, the gap should only increase and cross 1 million.
Job growth is slowing down
To help smooth out any one months result it is worthwhile to look at 3, 6 and 12-month trailing numbers. You can see the slowdown in the number of jobs being added when you look at these averages.
12 month per month average of 192,000 equals 2.3 million per year (and the second month in a row it has been under 200,000 per month)
6 month per month average of 172,000 equals 2.07 million per year
3 month per month average of 171,000 equals 2.05 million per year
Not the best economy ever
The underlying economy is weaker than perceived when you look at March quarter’s GDP numbers and railroad traffic taking a significant downward move over the past month. If the economy continues on this path it could enter a recession when few are forecasting one with one reliable indicator foreshadowing a downturn in the next 6 to 18 months. It could become a self-fulfilling prophecy as almost 70% of CFO’s are predicting a recession by the end of 2020.
Waiting for Obama
Barack Obama is literally more popular than Jesus among Democrats. Unfortunately, neither the former president nor any of the party’s 23 candidates currently seeking the 2020 nomination know quite what to do with that information.
Of course, before any serious endorsement conversation can commence, Obama has to finish his book (between rounds of golf and raising millions for his foundation). The writing has been going more slowly than he’d expected, and according to several people who have spoken with him, the 44th president is feeling competitive with his wife, whose own book, Becoming, was the biggest release of 2018 and is on track to be the best-selling memoir in history. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others in this story, these sources note he’ll occasionally say in conversation that he’s writing this book himself, while Michelle used a ghostwriter. He’s also trying to balance the historical and political needs of a project that will be up to his standards as a writer, and not 1,000 pages long. Obama’s research process has been intense and convoluted, and it’s still very much ongoing, from the legal pads he had shipped to Marlon Brando’s old island in French Polynesia, where he spent a month in March 2017, to the interviews that aides have been conducting with former members of his administration to jog and build out memories.
The untitled memoir, which will reportedly begin with his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech and cover his two terms in the White House, won’t be released in 2019, as his publisher, Penguin Random House, had predicted just a few months ago. Dropping the book this year would have helped Obama largely avoid the current political calendar, and a 2020 release threatens to affect the primaries and the party’s campaign against Donald Trump by re-litigating decisions made a decade ago. Another option is to hold it until 2021, when Obama could be either the voice of a party in despair after another defeat, or poised to grab the spotlight from a freshly elected Democratic president. Publishers tend to save their marquee releases to coincide with the holiday-shopping season—Michelle Obama’s book came out a week before Thanksgiving—but doing so in 2020 would mean the book would hit shelves right after Election Day. Katie Hill, an Obama spokesperson, told me that no decisions have been made on the new timing for publication. Hill gave me a statement carefully written to keep the former president’s distance, saying he “welcomes the debate” playing out in the primaries. “The policy debate has shifted since 2007and 2008, and that’s good—it’s evidence of the progress made since then by activists and elected officials at all levels. Big, bold ideas are a sign of the Democratic Party’s strength, and President Obama urges everyone running to be transparent with voters about how these ideas will work in the nitty-gritty, how they’re paid for, and how they’ll affect the lives of all Americans.”
As with Becoming, this book will have more than a standard release. Aides expect Obama to go on tour, with a rush of interviews in which he’ll be expected to talk not just about what he’s written, but about Trump and whatever political news is unfolding that day. When that conversation has come up internally, according to people involved in the discussions, he often says simply, “I can handle it.”
Voters shouldn’t expect him to do almost anything political, or even public, until next year, potentially not until the next Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. But with former Vice President Joe Biden talking up Obama every chance he gets, the rest of the field is weighing how much they want to present themselves as a restoration of the previous administration, a continuation, or a new approach to politics entirely.
Obama hasn’t committed to fundraising or other political activity beyond an email that went out last week, signed with his name, announcing the creation of a new general-election fund at the Democratic National Committee. The aide who handled Obama’s political activity through the midterms left earlier this year, and has yet to be replaced. But a source close to the former president told me he is still receiving calls from 2020 hopefuls. The candidates are reportedly looking for more of the wise-elder conversations he hosted through last year’s midterms and beyond, scrounging for advice, and cherishing the fun of getting to talk with a former commander in chief. Some are already on their second or third chat. Obama remains firm that he won’t endorse soon, while aides are stressing that he might get involved later in the process—presumably, the thinking goes, to stop a candidate he sees as too divisive or likely to lose from becoming the nominee. (This hasn’t been specified, but most assume it would be to stop Bernie Sanders.)
Obama and his aides have carefully guarded when and how to deploy him; some have even theorized he could be called on to broker who the 2020 nominee is, if the primaries finish without a clear winner and Democrats face a contested convention. They feel gratified by what happened in the 2018 midterms, when after a year of being dogged by complaints that he’d disappeared, he burst into the final weeks of the campaign season with an intense assault on Trump. As the 2020 race kicked off, Obama stepped out of the way to avoid looming over the conversation, but he is acutely aware that if Biden secures the nomination next summer, that will change. Democrats with ties to Obama expect he will then have to get even more involved next year, both out of a personal friendship and a feeling that the election would become a referendum on his presidency.
The way Biden is campaigning, though, Obama is a regular presence on the trail. On his first day in the race, Biden told reporters that he’d asked Obama not to endorse him (despite firm statements from Obama’s orbit making it clear that he’d decided himself not to endorse his former veep). During his Philadelphia rally this past weekend, Biden said, “Let me stop here and say something we don’t say often enough as a party or as a nation: Barack Obama is a man of extraordinary character, courage, and decency. He was a president our children could look up to and did. He was a great president. I was proud to serve every day as his vice president, but never more proud than on the day we passed health care.”
“For Biden, it’s a very important piece of his CV; it’s a very important part of his story,” Randi Weingarten, the head of the national teachers’ union, told me in an interview. “For everyone else, they’re talking about how their own biography leads them to certain things.”
Biden wasn’t the first 2020 candidate to invoke the former president’s name on the stump. Asked at his own kickoff press conference in February about past conversations with 44, Senator Cory Booker repurposed a favorite line: “Well, first of all, I just want everybody to know, I miss Obama, and I miss her husband, too.” Beto O’Rourke, who’s attracted a number of top Obama alumni, has been comparing his race to the 2008 campaign. On Tuesday night, during a CNN town hall, O’Rourke called Obama “the greatest president of my lifetime, as far as I’m concerned.”
But to paraphrase a Biden joke from 2007, Biden’s 2020 campaign so far is almost a noun, a verb, and Barack Obama. Biden talks about his old boss in nearly every speech, using him as a validator, a shield from criticism, and a way of summoning nostalgia. During his first week in the race, Biden’s campaign released a video that draws extensively from remarks the former president made in 2017, when presenting Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in their closing days in the White House. It was purposefully made to sound like an endorsement, and produced with the approval of Obama’s office.
Biden advisers declined to comment on the record about how much he’s talking about Obama, wary of seeming like he’s doing it out of crass political calculation. To the Biden team, other presidential candidates not talking about Obama as much as they could is an example of misreading political chatter on Twitter as representing voters overall, and failing to realize how popular Obama actually is among Democrats. And it’s not just Dems: The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA released a new poll this week finding that among registered voters in the key 2020 swing states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Obama’s approval rating is at 54 percent, way above Trump, who is at 40 percent.
MNA/TT