Online Editor
The nation’s high unemployment rate could cost President Barack Obama his job in 2012.
Such has been the sentiment of economists across the country who have been keeping watch over the rate of joblessness, which continues to disproportionately impact African Americans.
"No president has ever been re-elected with an unemployment this high," Christian Dorsey, director for external and government affairs at the D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, told the Washington Informer. "So it would be unprecedented for a president to have unemployment rates this high [since President Franklin Roosevelt] and to enjoy re-election [as], it’s never happened before."
According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics’ May 2011 report, while the nationwide unemployment rate of 9.1 percent remained essentially unchanged over the past year, the current rate for African Americans stands at 16.2 percent. Last year at this time, the rate for unemployed African Americans hovered around 15 percent.
William Galston, a domestic policy expert who worked in the Clinton administration, said in GPB News interview that he believes Obama has dropped the ball on jobs.
"I have long thought that President Obama hasn't placed economic growth and jobs dead center in his agenda consistently enough," Galston said. "That was a principle reason the health care adventure dismayed me."
Economists also contend that the economic recovery initiative set in motion in 2009 by the Obama administration, has come to a grinding to a halt.
As a result, the president – who is angling for a second term at the helm – could face some complications, they have said.
To that end, Dorsey added that in moving forward, people are going to expect Obama to be managing a plan that will not only grow jobs, but which will eventually bring the economy back to where it needs to be.
