Obama will still take credit.
Via The Guardian:
The Great Recession came as a wave of blows to Tom Bumpas.
In 2008, he lost his job of 20 years in the recreational vehicle manufacturing capital of the world – Elkhart County, Indiana. Demand plummeted for what are popularly known as RVs, the wheeled apartments in which Americans tour their country, and unemployment in Elkhart surged to nearly 20%.
One of Bumpas’s brothers and his two sisters were laid off, too, and moved in with him along with their children. A sister and her child stayed for a year.
Elkhart travels Obama’s slow road to recovery but struggles to feel the benefit
Read moreBumpas, 54, found another job but was made redundant again three months later. He used almost all his savings to pay the mortgage and care for his own three children as a single parent while picking up part-time work.
To compound Bumpas’s misery, Barack Obama kept turning up in Elkhart promising to make things better.
“I thought it was a joke. He said he was going to be there for us. He didn’t do anything,” said Bumpas.
The president might legitimately claim credit for rescuing the US economy and pulling Elkhart back from the brink. Demand for RVs has bounced back and manufacturing is booming again in the county, which makes 80% of motorhomes built in the US . The RV industry employs more than 40,000 people in the county.
As a result, the jobless rate has plummeted from one of the highest in the country to 3.8% in the city of Elkhart, well below the national average. Bumpas is back in full time work servicing motorhomes.
But he, like many in Elkhart from the mayor to the owners of RV businesses, sees no reason to give much credit to Washington for financial policies that helped revive the area’s economy or the US president for the attention he has paid. Instead, it’s the Republicans’ anti-government message that frequently has resonance around Elkhart County – and particularly Donald Trump’s assertion that the key to prosperity is to run the country as if it is a business.
Obama won Indiana by a tiny margin in 2008, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so in more than 40 years. But he lost heavily in the state in 2012 and took just 36% of the vote in Elkhart County.
This year’s presidential race promises to be a tighter contest in Indiana but Bumpas isn’t impressed by the choice of candidates.
“It’s picking the best of the evils,” he said before declining to say what he thought of the contenders or who he would vote for.
One of Bumpas’ coworkers, PJ McGann, who was also laid off in 2008 after 14 years working for one of the country’s biggest RV makers, was more forthright.
“I think we’re very limited with our options. If Bernie gets in there, it’ll be worse than Obama. I’m torn. I definitely don’t want Hillary,” he said. “I do believe that the country needs somebody that’s not tied to the political establishment. I believe Trump could actually do the job. I haven’t decided if I’m going to vote for him or not. I’d like to do some more research on that.”
They were agreed on one thing.
“We don’t want another Obama,” said Bumpas.