Team Obama needs more arithmetic

Maybe the Obama campaign needs to bring Bill Clinton back for another lesson in Arithmetic. When Steve Croft on CBS’s 60 Minutes confronted President Obama Sunday a week ago about an unemployment rate of more than eight percent, he got a stumbling response.     

Suppose that Team Obama instead had prepared him with the right answer, “You know, Steve, that in the 12 months leading into my inauguration, unemployment went up every month, a total of 59.2 percent. From a 4.9 percent rate at the end of January 2008, it increased 59.2 percent a year later, to 7.8. With that momentum, it went up monthly, to 10 percent in October of my first year. Since then it’s dropped to 8.2 percent, an 18 percent decline. Get your fact-checker to Google “U.S. Unemployment“ at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

With more time for arithmetic, the president could have pointed to the stock market. Although it fell measurably last week, after the 60 Minutes questioning, the Dow still closed Friday at 13,437.13, a gain of 69.1 percent from its inauguration day closing of 7,947.08. The Standand and Poor's 500 and the NASDAQ have done even better. The S&P closed Friday at 1,440.67, a 78.9 percent increase from inauguration day. The NASDAQ has more than doubled, its Friday closing of 3,116.23 a whopping 116.3 percent gain.

The stock market will fluctuate and data may be dull, but as Bill Clinton pointed out, arithmetic tells us something. It would allow Obama to say clearly that the economy is moving in the right direction and cite the facts to back it up. 

Bass is author or co-author of nine books about the American South, including The Transformation of Southern Politics and professor of humanities and social sciences emeritus at the College of Charleston.)