Poitipocalypse Redux

CLEVELAND — Tuesday night’s Republican convention theme will be Make America Work Again, echoing Donald Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the U.S. economy under President Barack Obama. “The president has been regulating to death a free-market economy he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand,” the GOP platform declares. The delegates here have varying degrees of enthusiasm for Trump, but they all seem to agree the Obama economy is a ghastly mess.

Except for the economy wherever they happen to live.

“Actually, we’re doing great,” says Donna Gottschall, a human resources consultant in Greenville, S.C. “Employment’s up. Housing’s up. Everything’s green in Greenville!”

“Oh, yeah, unemployment is way down,” says Al Baldasaro, a state legislator and retired Marine from Londonderry, N.H. “Obviously, it’s gotten better.”

“Things are wonderful in our town,” says Ranae Lentz, a Republican county chair from Bellefontaine, Ohio. “We can’t fill all the job openings.”

Just as most Americans say they hate Congress but routinely vote for their local congressmen, most Republicans seem to detect a national economic malaise while — with some exceptions in places like coal country and the oil patch — touting the economic progress in their local communities. They square that circle in a variety of ways — crediting their Republican mayors and governors, accusing Obama of manipulating data, or citing legitimate weaknesses in the recovery from the Great Recession. But with unemployment down from 10 percent to less than 5 percent since late 2009, one of Trump’s many challenges will be convincing non-Republicans that America isn’t working even though nearly 15 million more Americans are.

Trump illustrated this problem last week when he introduced his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence. He said the “primary reason” for his choice was that Indiana’s unemployment had dropped by 3.4 percentage points in four years under Pence, and that its labor force had grown, which he said was “very unusual” for a U.S. state.

“It’s always bad, down, down, down,” Trump said. “Down 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent in some cases.” In fact, the drop in Indiana’s unemployment almost perfectly mirrors the national trend. And the labor force has grown in all but nine states with the worst drop only 3 percentage points in oil-dependent North Dakota. In February 2009, Obama highlighted the free-falling economy he inherited by visiting Elkhart, Indiana, where unemployment was nearly 20 percent; he recently returned to Elkhart to highlight America’s recovery, and unemployment was 4 percent.

Still, in interviews in Cleveland, Republican delegates repeatedly described economic gains that seem ordinary in national context as hometown anomalies. Jeanita McNulty, a liaison for foreign exchange students in Blue Grass, Iowa, attributed the strong local labor market to a Republican governor and small-town values. “Iowans work hard,” she said. “There’s a lot of real pride in the Midwest.”

"Facts"

Isn't calling for the jailing of political opponents how dictatorships typically role?