With the employment news today about 100,000 jobs better than expected — “the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November” — I thought I’d run this graph Nate Silver posted a couple weeks ago in a post titled, “It’s [Still] The Economy, Dumbass.”
Nate wrote “this is my favorite graph in quite some time,” and pointed out
… you’ll have pundits attributing Obama’s slide to all various and sundry sorts of things — Health Care! Henry Louis Gates! Torture Trials! — when really it’s just been very much about the number of people who have come to blame Obama about the economy has tended to accelerate faster than perceptions of the economy itself.
Same for climate and clean energy.
Yes, team Obama’s messaging could certainly be better, but the point is all the non-economic stuff is probably secondary if not tertiary to Obama’s ratings. If indeed we’ve hit bottom in the jobs market — and Floyd Norris, the NYT’s chief financial correspondent thinks “The Job Drought May Be Over” and “this will not be a jobless recovery” — then that is yet another good piece of news for the prospects of a bipartisan climate and clean energy bill. Indeed, it is two pieces of good news, since it would not only mean a stabilization if not improvement of his overall approval ratings, but clear proof that his stimulus, with its big clean energy jobs push, had make a significant impact.
