Despite economy,Obama can still win
Thursday, February 2, 2012 
The conventional wisdom among many political pundits is that President Barack Obama faces an uphill re-election battle in large part because unemployment seems stuck at historically high levels. Economists who have studied the impact of the job market on past elections beg to disagree.
It’s true that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has been elected when the unemployment rate was over 7.2 percent. That was where the jobless rate stood in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won a second term, beating Walter Mondale in a landslide, with 59 percent of the popular vote.
The jobless rate stood at 7.4 percent when George H.W. Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid against challenger Bill Clinton; it was at 7.5 percent in November 1980, when Jimmy Carter lost his job to Reagan.
If that were the only statistic that mattered, Obama indeed would have his work cut out for him.
Though the job market began gradually improving in the second half of last year, employment growth remains sluggish. The jobless rate dropped by a sharp 0.5 percentage point in the last three months of 2011 but currently stands at 8.5 percent and is expected to show little or no improvement when the government reports updated January data on Friday. Some forecasters caution the rate might even rise again this year as “discouraged” workers, who are not included in the official "headline" rate, begin looking for work again and raise the count of those considered unemployed.
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