Economy, Congress and Obama

Many people are of the opinion that the 2012 election will go bad for Obama if the economy isn't doing well. However, the polls don't really indicating this so far.

While it is true that presidents usually get the blame for the economy this is not always the case. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected during the darkest days of the Great Depression after failing to have solved the country's economic woes in his first four years.

The reason FDR did so well is that people by that time were well aware that it was more than decade of Republican policy that had caused the economic mess. In the same way, polls are indicating that the American voter does not blame Obama for the current state of the economy.

Now, it is true that people are not happy with his handling of the economy, but this is not too surprising. The public expects nothing less than positive, if not miraculous, results so it really would not matter who was in power now.

The simple truth is that the economic woes facing the country are deeply entrenched and will defy any simple solution. Just as in the Great Depression, it took many years to unravel more than a decade of failed policy.

However, today, we are reeling from nearly three decades of easy money policy. Bill Clinton was able to dent this policy, but only on the governmental level. In the world of finance and Federal Reserve policy, the Clinton economists did not differ all that much from the Republican ones.

The big difference between FDR's time and now is that the people then had come to the full conclusion that Republicans were to blame for the Great Depression. Today, there are still many doubters. We can see this by the fact that Democrats control the House of Representatives.

In FDR's day, he won his first term with an overwhelming majority that was not just Democratic but was also progressive. And when he was reelected, Congress became even more strongly Democrat!

The makeup in Congress allowed FDR to take charge and restructure a badly-damaged economy. While Obama can win in 2012, it may not mean much if he doesn't have a friendly Congress to help him with his agenda.