The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back over 11,000, corporations are flush with $2 trillion in cash, growth has held up for more than a year, and interest rates are at record lows — to cite a few promising signs for the economic recovery.
But none of that does much to cheer the average voter, who remains fixated on the high jobless rate of 9.6 percent and on the struggle many families are having maintaining their lifestyles or even just surviving after the hit from the recession.
The overwhelming importance of the job market — polls show that most Americans see the unemployment rate as the single best measure of the economy's health — is bad news for President Obama and incumbent legislators in his party. Voters are expected to target them next month in venting their anger and frustration at the languid economic recovery.
Democrats are in a pickle, if only because unemployment is particularly high among traditional Democratic constituencies. Joblessness among blacks and Hispanics is much higher than average, at 16 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
And among the Millennial generation that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama in 2008, the difficulty of finding jobs is acute: Recent college graduates go begging for jobs, while nearly one in four teenagers reports being out of work.
Even news of a steady trickle of job openings created by businesses since the beginning of the year has failed to inspire hope or impress most voters.
"They won't help the administration as the midterm elections approach," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, predicting that high joblessness and the weak economic recovery have sealed the Democrats' fate.
"It's too late for any policies enacted now to make the economy look better by Election Day," he said. Voters have made up their minds that the economy looks bad, and Washington is at least partly to blame.
Ironically, the parts of the economy that are doing well are those that benefit corporations, business executives and investors — higher-income groups that generally are viewed as Republican constituencies.
Corporate America is knee-deep in profits and mountains of cash. But rather than deploying that money to create jobs or expand operations, many companies have been using it to issue dividends and purchase their stock, driving up the value not only of company shares, but the stock market in general.
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