Romney's Unemployment Rate Dilemma - NYTimes.com Mitt Romney is promising to turn the economy around if he is elected president. And there may be no more visceral measure of whether he ultimately keeps that promise than the nation's unemployment rate. But in recent weeks, Mr. Romney has struggled with how much to promise when it comes to the famous jobless figure. Pledge too much improvement and he looks naïve; predict too little change and he undercuts his argument for replacing President Obama. On Wednesday, Mr. Romney revived that political dilemma for himself by once again saying in an interview that unemployment will be at 6 percent by the end of 2016 - the conclusion of his first term in the Oval Office. "I can tell you, after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent - perhaps a little lower," Mr. Romney told Time Magazine on Wednesday. He first made that pledge in a jobs plan he unveiled last year. The promise is designed to offer a stark contrast with Mr. Obama, who currently presides over an economy with an 8.1 percent unemployment rate - 26 percent higher than the rate Mr. Romney said he could achieve. In a speech in Michigan this month, he said the country's current path "ends with us becoming like much of Europe with chronic high unemployment." But in fact, economists who predict the pace of employment growth - including the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Obama's budget officials and private economists - have already said they believe unemployment is on track to be about 6 percent by the end of 2016. The baseline forecast by the economic firm IHS Global Strategies is for the unemployment rate to hit 6 percent by the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the firm's chief economist, Nigel Gault. Mr. Obama's budget office predicted that unemployment would decline to 6.1 percent by 2016. And the budget office projections show a 6 percent unemployment rate by the end of 2016. Figures from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve show a similar trajectory assuming that monthly job growth would be around 175,000 to 185,000 - about where it's been for the past year or so under Mr. Obama's stewardship. For Mr. Romney, the challenge is a communications and persuasion one. In order to persuade voters to pick him over Mr. Obama, he must demonstrate that he would make their personal situations markedly better. That argument loses power if his promise is the same as the one that Mr. Obama makes. Mr. Romney's campaign will no doubt argue that Mr. Obama's policies will not achieve that goal, or will do so more slowly than he would. Mr. Romney often argues that the policies put in place by Mr. Obama - including stimulus spending and passage of health care and financial reform legislation - has slowed the country's recovery. But from a political point of view, the president has the current unemployment trajectory on his side. The unemployment rate has come down from a high of 10.1 percent to just over 8 percent. That will make it easier for Mr. Obama's team to argue that the country is headed in the right direction. Faced with that improvement, Mr. Romney has at times suggested that electing him would mean a dramatic improvement in unemployment over what Mr. Obama is promising to achieve. At the beginning of May, when the government announced relatively slow job growth in April, Mr. Romney slammed the president, saying "anything near 8 percent or over 4 percent is not cause for celebration." The idea of reaching a 4 percent unemployment rate any time soon was widely panned by economists, who noted that it would take more than 500,000 jobs a month to reach that goal by the end of Mr. Romney's term. That level of job growth has only happened a few times in the last 50 years. Mr. Romney and the campaign did not back away from the 4 percent figure that day. But neither has he - or his campaign - repeated it since then. On Wednesday, he ignored the fact that by his earlier measure, a 6 percent unemployment rate would not be "cause for celebration." Either way, by making predictions, Mr. Romney is walking into the same trap that Mr. Obama's economic advisers stumbled into at the beginning of the president's term. Mr. Romney likes to remind audiences that top White House officials in 2009 promised that passage of the stimulus plan would keep unemployment below 8 percent. "You remember three years ago, the newly elected president said "Let me borrow $787 billion, I'll keep unemployment below 8 percent." It hasn't been below since," Mr. Romney said in Florida earlier this year. This president has failed the American people. Now, Mr. Romney is on the record with his own promises. The year 2016 may seem like an eternity away. And it won't matter anyway if Mr. Romney doesn't win the election. But if he replaces Mr. Obama in the White House, Mr. Romney may find that keeping his promises are just as tricky.