“You’re Under Oath”: Which Party Creates More Jobs?
Here’s a little something everybody ought to know about, from Bloomberg News. They tallied up private-sector job creation since Kennedy’s presidency. Democrats have held the White House for 23 of those years, according to Bberg, and Republicans 28. So fill in this blank: The U.S. economy has created ___ private-sector jobs in the Democrats’ 23 years, and ___ such jobs in the Republicans’ 28 years.
Before we get to the answer, let’s toss in a little background. The political scientist Larry Bartels published a book, Unequal Democracy, on precisely this subject in 2008. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books. It was interesting because social scientists like Bartels don’t want to think that politics really drives events, but Bartels looked at the evidence on job creation and economic growth under every president since Truman and reached certain inevitable conclusions.
Does that give you any hints? I’ll tell you: Adjust your first-instinct numbers. Then adjust them again.
Ready? Now I’m just killing time so that the answer will be below the fold.
The answer is that 42 million jobs were created under Democratic presidents, and 24 million under Republicans. You can check out the chart here. The champion of course is Clinton, with 20.8 million under Bberg’s numbers. Then comes Reagan at 14.7. Then come Johnson and Carter (yep, Carter). Then Nixon. And so on.
George W. Bush? The private sector lost 600,000 jobs. Imagine. In eight years, he did not create a single job. Obama is now in positive territory to the tune of 40,000, so even though Dubya handed him the biggest economic catastrophe in 80 years, he at least is in the black.
Anyway. The numbers are amazing. And it gets even better. Bloomberg’s Bob Drummond also counted up the number of public-sector jobs created in the respective 23 and 28 years. Results: Federal, state, and local government payrolls grew by 7.1 million under Republicans, and 6.3 million under Democrats.
So drink this in: Private-sector job growth is massively greater under Democrats, and it’s Republicans who’ve increased the public tit.
Now, some sophisticates will say well, you can’t really measure these things from the day a president took office. Better to start when that president’s policies started taking effect. But that is exactly what Bartels did (read my Review piece for details)—and it still came out to a huge advantage for Democratic presidents. In fact, the Obama jobs numbers would be pretty terrific under this methodology, because he wouldn’t have all those Bush-created job losses hanging around his neck. And at the front end, Dubya got credit for some jobs that Clinton’s policies actually created.
If I were the head of the DNC, I’d buy a billboard on a prominent roadway in every county in America and slap these numbers up there.
By: Michael Tomasky The Daily Beast, May 10, 2012
“Living In Glass Mansions”: How Dare Republicans Attack Obama On Bin Laden Death
Americans and the world came together to mark the one year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden. Now those on the right attack the president for an ad that is running regarding his decisions surrounding this event. And for the past year, many on the right have belittled or downplayed the president’s role in this event. Now, they accuse him of being the divisive one…perhaps they should not stand so close to their glass houses.
And over the weekend, Arianna Huffington, a former Republican who claims to be a liberal, called an ad run by the Obama campaign on this very issue “despicable.”
Despicable?!
I have watched the ad several times now. What is despicable about it I wonder?
The president is in a tough and tight race to keep his position as president. In the ad, former President Bill Clinton points out the decision the president made, how difficult it is, and how different the styles of President Obama and his opponent Mitt Romney are in this regard.
When you’re in a bid for re-election, and you are being attacked for the economy, the unemployment rate, the housing market, environmental issues, the behavior of government offices and staff, illegal immigrants, foreign policy, etc., why isn’t it okay to point out your accomplishments? Why shouldn’t the American people know the differences between the candidates they’re looking at voting for, or against?
Now some say it’s taking Mitt Romney’s words out of context that is disturbing. Well, where was the outrage last November when a Mitt Romney ad quoted President Obama saying something that actually Sen. John McCain, President Obama’s former opponent, had said? Mitt Romney did not apologize for the ad, even though it was proven the president was misquoted, his words taken out of context. Or more recently, when the Romney camp went running with a “silver spoon” remark the president made, also taken out of context!?
I am amazed how the right wing constantly attacks, slings mud, takes words of those running for office on the left out of context, but now that a Democrat dares to do it—well, watch out! I’m not sure if it’s the truth that hurts in this ad, or the fact the Democrats were using Republican-style campaign tactics. Besides, I was always taught everything’s fair in love, war, and presidential campaigns, right?
The bottom line is this is the very party that questioned President Obama’s religion, his place of birth, demanded to see his birth certificate; this is the party that did not become outraged with the numerous racial slurs and cartoons that surfaced since President Obama came on the radar screen; this is the very party that remained silent as the first lady was booed at a NASCAR event for charity; and now a decision that made the world safer is being attacked by the right—that, I find despicable.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, May 2, 2012
Romney Offers False Explanation Of Cross-Party Primary Vote In 1992
In 1992, Republican Mitt Romney voted in a Democratic primary, backing former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas for the Democratic presidential nomination. He said he did so because he wanted to “vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponentfor the Republican.”
Romney is now railing against the Santorum campaign for trying to get traditional Democratic voters to cross-over and vote in the Republican primary. Romney has called this a “terrible dirty trick” and an “attempt to kidnap the primary process.”
In a press conference in Livonia, Michigan, moments ago, Romney was asked how we squared this criticism with his earlier admission that his 1992 primary vote had been a “vote for the person who [he] thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican.”
Romney responded with a new explanation:
In my case, I was certainly voting against the Democrat who I thought was the person I thought would be the worst leader of our nation. In this case, as I recall, it was Bill Clinton. I wanted someone other than Bill Clinton. I voted against Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, and Bill Clinton. Seemed like a good group to be against.
Watch the video:
While to conservatives, that trio would indeed seem a “good group to be against,” there is no way Romney could have voted against all three that year.
While then-Governor Clinton was indeed on the primary ballot in 1992, Sen. Ted Kennedy was not up for re-election until 1994. Romney should know that, given he ran against Kennedy that year and often brags about the fact that he forced the late Democrat to “take a mortgage out on his house.”
And House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr.? His final campaign for the U.S. House had been eight years earlier, in 1984.
It’s odd that Romney claims to remember events that happened nine months before his birth, but cannot seem remember the 1990s.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, February 28, 2012
“The Plus-Size One”: Self-Adoration Reaches Newt Heights
Marveling over a presidential candidate’s arrogance is like noting that a hockey player wears skates. It states not just the obvious but the necessary. You can’t zip across the ice in Crocs, and you can’t thrash your way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if your confidence doesn’t bleed into something gaudier. Arrogance is the grist, and arrogance is the given.
But what flavor? And what measure?
That’s where candidates — and the presidents that some of them become — differ, in ways that shape the sorts of messes they’re likely to make. And that’s where Newt Gingrich provokes real concern. You have to take another politician’s ego, double it, and add cheese and a side of fries to get to Gingrich. An especially heaping, unhealthy diet of self-regard slogs through his veins.
His 1990s nemesis Bill Clinton had (and surely still has) no small amount of his own vanity, and it lay largely in his conviction that his charm and cunning enabled him to wriggle out of jams and get away with indulgences that would doom a lesser mortal. He fancied himself an escape artist extraordinaire.
That partly explains the risk he took with Monica Lewinsky, along with his verbal gymnastics upon the discovery of the affair. The scandal’s diminution of his presidency was the price he and we paid for his particular arrogance.
George W. Bush was in love with his own gut instinct, which he valued far above actual erudition. By heeding it, he believed, he could exceed the expectations and even surpass the accomplishments of less visceral leaders, namely his father. It’s not hard to draw a direct line from that brand of arrogance to the Iraq war, which came to an official end last week, after nearly nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars and too many lives lost.
Barack Obama’s arrogance resides in his eloquence — as a writer, thinker, symbol and story. He’s in thrall to the lyric poem of himself, and that accounts for his aloofness and disinclination to engage as deeply as some of his predecessors did in the muck of legislative politics.
Yes, we live in a grotesquely partisan moment, the main reason for gridlock, brinkmanship and super-committee ignominy on Capitol Hill. But would Clinton have stood at so far a remove from that committee? Isn’t it possible that a glad-hander more aggressive and warmer than Obama would be making a smidgen of headway?
Gingrich isn’t the answer: he’s hot-headed and truculent. And while Obama sees himself (with justification) as historic, Gingrich sees himself as epic. If Obama is The One, Gingrich is The Plus-Size One.
Lately he has been on less bloated behavior, and by lately I mean the few weeks since he emerged as the Republican frontrunner du jour. If you watched the debate Thursday, you could sense, from the clench of his jaw, that he wasn’t merely biting his tongue but making an unhappy meal of it.
Still, Gingrich the Grandiloquent sneaked through. Asked about his stated resolve to rein in federal courts, he said that “just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and F.D.R., I would be prepared to take on the judiciary.” The company he keeps!
Over the years he has directly or indirectly compared himself to Moses, William Wallace (a k a “Braveheart,” thanks to Mel Gibson), the Duke of Wellington, Charles de Gaulle and, repeatedly, Ronald Reagan, as when he recently said, “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.”
All the way back in 1985, when he was just a foot soldier in the House, he told The Washington Post, “I want to shift the entire planet,” adding, “This is just the beginning of a 20- or 30-year movement. I’ll get credit for it.”
As Maureen Dowd recalled in The Times last year, he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1994, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” In a Vanity Fair profile in 1995, he referred to himself as “a mythical person” and was quoted saying, “I had a period of thinking that I would have been called ‘Newt the McPherson,’ as in ‘Robert the Bruce.’ ” His biological father’s surname was McPherson, and Robert the Bruce was a Scottish warrior of William Wallace’s era and ilk.
Gingrich also considered himself a “definer of civilization” and “teacher of the rules of civilization,” phrases he scribbled in House office notes that came to light in 1997.
He thinks a lot about himself and thinks of himself a lot. In 2007, talking about climate change, which he still believed in then, he singled out polar bears for concern, explaining that his name, Newt, “comes from the Danish ‘Knut,’ and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named Knut.’ ”
One of the great spectator sports of this political season has been watching one observer after another strive to trace the full contours of his ego, an arm’s race of arrogance assessments. “Modern-day Narcissus,” wrote Kirsten Powers in The Daily Beast. “Intellectual hubris distilled,” contributed George F. Will in The Washington Post. “A lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg,” said Mark Steyn in The National Review, and while that’s not precisely about arrogance, it’s too funny to pass up.
A grandiose man, Gingrich speaks in grandiose ways, always characterizing situations too broadly and with too much needless heat, then losing chunks of valuable time, along with precious credibility, to the inevitable damage control.
He didn’t simply register disagreement with Paul Ryan’s entitlement reform proposals. He called them radical “right-wing social engineering.” He didn’t simply raise questions about child labor laws. He called them “truly stupid.” He didn’t simply contest the Palestinians’ claim to disputed land. He called the Palestinians an “invented” people.
That’s an intellectually intriguing, attention-commanding expression: Gingrich no doubt loved the nasty music of it tumbling from his lips. But it’s also gratuitously inflammatory. Mitt the Romney was right to call it that and call him out for it.
Romney has utter, exaggerated faith in his managerial know-how, his technocratic mettle. That’s the flavor of his arrogance.
Gingrich’s is sourer — and scarier. People who have worked with him say that he can’t do justice to any one initiative because he can’t hold any one thought. There are too many others rushing along, and he must pay each proper reverence, because no matter how eccentric it is, it’s his.
That self-adoration made him an infuriating House speaker. It would make him a dangerous president.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 17, 2011
GOP’s Debt Ceiling Fight Is About Bringing Down Obama
Impeach him.
Not the president. Barack Obama is holding a huge global and domestic crisis in his hand. To use a Washington metaphor, he’s dangerously close to being left “holding the bag” on the Treasury debt ceiling limit. He keeps talking sweet reason about the art of compromise to Republicans in Congress—not a language they speak. Obama played golf with the House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican who drones on about “small business” every chance he gets. Obama is not getting traction or making friends with Boehner because he does not grasp the conversation about the debt limit is not about the debt limit. It’s about taking his presidency down—this week—even if it hurts the United States of America, which it will. A small price to pay for this tea-drinking crowd of 87 GOP House freshmen which turned the chamber upside down six months ago.
“This is no way to run the greatest country on earth,” Obama declared in a belated speech, sounding a call to arms around the country, last night. That in itself says so much—he’s right, but he’s the man who’s elected by the people—not John Boehner who was elected by a small-town slice of Ohio—to run the country! Everything was calculated to leave Obama in the lurch—by Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of the old Confederate capital, Richmond, Va. and at least one other mastermind. The conspiracy has succeeded flawlessly so far. They separated Obama from his own party in Congress; in his dealings with only Republicans he went way beyond Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. Obama made allies feel like they were shut out of the deal-making room when he offered concessions that cut at the heart of the Democratic Party‘s proud history on social programs dating to the New Deal.
The GOP—and I mean the George W. Bush years and the current crop of Senate Republicans, too—has a new deal for you, too. It’s called the New Steal. It goes like this: we’ll take all the peace and prosperity of the Clinton tax code years up until 2000 and then squander it on a couple unwinnable wars of choice—and by the way, make rich people pay less into the Treasury than they did during those golden years. They might start one of those illusory “small businesses.”
The reason President Clinton was acquitted at his impeachment trial in the Senate for a fling with Monica Lewinsky was because he built bonds of loyalty, teamwork and camaraderie with Democrats in both houses of Congress. Not one of them came forward on the floor to speak against him, except pious Sen. Joe Lieberman, who suggested a censure. He was utterly alone in his opportunistic little ploy. Clinton’s true friends all stood by him in the Senate—because he was their president.
Obama, a bit of a loner, needs more bosom buddies among lawmakers. In a crisis, you find out who your friends are. The one who could have steered him straight, sailing into the wind, was the late great senator, Edward M. Kennedy. When Kennedy got his Irish up and roared on the floor, he scared the forest. Obama does not scare the Republican jungle.
Let’s impeach Rush Limbaugh as the master of public dis-coarse. He’s the real reason we have so many angry white men in office who are plotting against the president. He’s writing the back-story of this debt drama, consulting closely with House Republican leaders step by step. I believe it even if I can’t see it because he did the same thing in 1994, in cahoots with Newt Gingrich, who recruited a new House Republican freshman class to take over the House. Yes, I saw Rush with my own eyes getting all the glory as class mascot at a fancy dinner at Camden Yards in Baltimore for the new Republican victors that enabled Gingrich to become speaker. The government shutdowns and showdowns against President Clinton resulted—remember?
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, July 26, 2011
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