If Mitt Romney was making a movie about the Great Depression, he’d try to cast President Obama as Herbert Hoover.
He more than other Republican candidates has made the flagging economy a central theme of his presidential campaign, and feels no compunction about blaming Obama for the mess.
The Romney camp has taken to tying Obama to the nation’s high long-term unemployment rate — and to saying that long-term unemployment is now worse than it was during the Great Depression. Indeed, a recent fundraising email, Romney claimed long-term unemployment is now the “worst in recorded history.”Â
There’s one big problem with this: It’s not true.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data only reaches back to 1948 — long after the Great Depression came to an end. The numbers they do have tell a brutal story. Over 40 percent of currently unemployed people have been without work for more than 27 weeks — a much greater number than at any point in the last 63 years.
Great Depression-era data, such as it exists can’t easily be compared to these BLS figures. But the Washington Post‘s fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave it a whirl and found two well-regarded historical accounts putting the number of people who’d been employed for more than a year over or about 60 percent of unemployed people. That’s significantly worse than the current figures — which suggests very strongly that Romney’s claim, which his camp based on a now-corrected CBS news story, is untrue.
This — along with, of course, the creation of key safety net programs in the years since 1929 — is one of the big reason things in this country don’t look much more like they did in the 1930s.
But the Obama administration — and, of course, the millions of people who’ve been without jobs for six months or more — will find little solace in the fact that Romney’s attack is false. “See, it’s not as bad as the Great Depression!” isn’t exactly a winning political message, and Romney knows it.
The political science literature on electability during periods of high unemployment suggests that Obama will be able to breathe a little easier if unemployment statistics improve noticeably next year, even if the rate on election day remains high.
But millions of Americans who’ve been without work for exceptionally long stretches will likely experience hardship even after they find jobs. And for that reason they might not have a favorable view of Obama even if things are improving a year from now.
