The left-leaning Democratic Party's living ex-presidents - Jimmy Carter (1977-81) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001) - sought re-election under very different conditions and had very different results. President Barack Obama is fighting hard to avoid joining their ranks until January 2017, when his second term would end if he can fend off Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the November 6 elections.
The economy and especially the job market are often decisive factors for presidents seeking re-election, and the numbers are unfavourable for Obama, 51. Unemployment remains at 8.3 percent in the United States, while the economy grew in the second quarter at a less-than-robust annual rate of 1.7 percent. No US president since World War II has been re-elected with the jobless rate above 7.2 percent; the long-term average of US gross domestic product growth has been about 3 percent over that same period.
Despite the economic statistics, Obama and Romney remain in a dead heat in most national opinion surveys, with the latest CNN/Opinion Research poll putting both candidates at 48 percent. Romney was nominated by his party last week and faces the challenge of convincing voters that he can is better suited to fix the economy than the incumbent president. Clinton, 66, put Obama's name into nomination in an hour-long speech to the Democratic National Convention late Wednesday in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The party's nearly 6,000 delegates formally approved the nomination, after raucously cheering Clinton's speech and Obama's brief appearance at the convention, where he was due to return Thursday to deliver an acceptance speech launching him into the final two months of campaigning before the general elections.
Clinton said that the Republicans "want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place." "I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better," he said. "He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long, hard road to recovery, and laid the foundations for a modern, more well-balanced economy."
The unemployment rate in 1996, when Clinton easily won re-election, averaged 5.4 percent, with an economic growth rate that year of 3.7 percent. Clinton was still politically popular when he left office in 2001 due to the US constitution's two-term limit on presidents.
Carter, in contrast, faced re-election with a jobless rate that averaged 7.1 percent in 1980, and US gross domestic product contracting by 0.3 percent. He was defeated by Ronald Reagan. Carter, a governor from Georgia with little national recognition, was elected in 1976 as a Washington outsider in the wake of the resignation of President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandals. Obama, who was elected to the US Senate in 2004, brought a similar outsider appeal and a "hope and change" slogan as the first African-American president.
Clinton and Obama both carry a degree of personal magnetism and cool confidence that Carter never projected. The 87-year-old Carter, addressing the Democratic convention by recorded video on Tuesday, hailed Obama's 2010 health-care reform law - a policy long sought by the left-leaning Democratic Party. Both Carter and Clinton had failed in politically costly efforts to pass legislation through Congress to extend coverage to most uninsured Americans.
Nicknamed Obamacare, the health-insurance reform was "a dream ... already decades overdue when I called for it at this convention 36 years ago," Carter said. The Republicans seized on the ex-president's appearance, pointing out that Carter and Obama both sought re-election with job markets that were just as bad as when they had entered office with promises to improve the economy. "From stagnant unemployment to a broken deficit pledge, both presidents left the country worse off than it was before they took office," said Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams, calling Carter "a fitting surrogate."
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