It’s been a great month for Hillary Clinton. She’s finally sewed up the Democratic nomination for president, a historic first for a woman in either major party. Meanwhile, Donald Trump keeps shooting himself in the ankles rather than settle down to a disciplined general election campaign. And the polls show Clinton ahead of her pugnacious GOP opponent even before Bernie Sanders loyalists resign themselves to voting for her in November.
And yet not all is blue skies and sunshine.
First, a damning report late last month by the State Department’s inspector general guarantees that Clinton will not be able to shake the charge that she deliberately, repeatedly and uniquely ignored rules regarding government e-mails and sensitive material, and then resisted coming clean with official investigators.
Second, it took her months to put away a left-wing challenger, during which she shredded her centrist credentials.
And perhaps most ominously, the economy may be slipping into neutral or worse, with only 38,000 net new jobs created in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If anything can keep Trump nipping at her heels, it’s a lackluster economy and the public perception that things are not getting better.
Plodding economic growth is in part what helped supercharge both the Trump and Sanders movements to begin with. Indeed, President Obama’s eight years in office will likely conclude with average annual growth of less than 2 percent, a discouraging performance even though all but six months of that period came after the Great Recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Labor force participation remains well below what it was in 2008, despite a now low unemployment rate. Clearly a lot of people who could be working just aren’t looking for a job.
Finally, productivity growth — which is key to sustaining rising wages — actually fell in the first quarter, the Labor Department announced this week. And as The Wall Street Journal reported, productivity has “expanded just 0.5 percent over the past five years,” the second-worst stretch since World War II.
Yet despite the clear need to spur growth and productivity, both major candidates seem wedded to policies that could do the opposite, dragging the economy into long-term stagnation. Trump famously wants to repudiate trade deals, hike tariffs and deport millions of productive immigrants, while Clinton pledges to pump up spending on a slew of programs while boosting the regulatory burden on various industries.
Either agenda could be toxic to growth, but voters will still have to choose. And yet if the economy is limping along, they may associate Clinton with the status quo and roll the dice with Trump.
It doesn’t matter if President Obama is technically correct when he asserts, as he did at the Air Force Academy last week, “We have the world’s strongest economy.” Voters in states like Pennsylvania and Florida don’t measure their personal status compared to workers in France and Japan. They rightly expect to see a vibrant economy in America.
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