Bush, the Father, was haunted by these words as he lost his reelection campaign to a formerly unknown Governor from Arkansas. This was surprising because Bush had been so successful. He had won a war with Iraq with relatively little cost in American lives or money. He facilitated the actual end of the Soviet Union, but the economy was falling and Americans vote with their wallets.
Obama needs to remember this as he goes into this next election. The average American who has lost or is afraid of losing their paycheck will ignore the capture of Bin Laden, the end of Khadafi, the saving of the American automotive industry. Obama can deliver world peace and it won't matter if people don't have jobs. Americans told Bush, "Its the Economy Stupid!" The will do the same for a democratic president over jobs.
This is not an opinion. Let's look at the data. A look at the last 60 years shows that no incumbent president has won reelection while the unemployment was rising.
We may want to be careful with this way of looking at the analysis, though. On 6/2/11, “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.” But as you can see from the data, below, FDR and Reagan did. It is possible to blame the guy before you, but it is not necessarily easy. Nate Silver at NYT did a great set of analyses of the data that are worth perusing:
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