“This Just Shouldn’t Be Possible”: Job Creation Trips Up GOP Message Machine
The more America’s job market improves, the tougher it is for Republicans to explain what’s happening. According to GOP talking points, tax hikes, regulations, and “Obamacare” are dragging down the economy, making it impossible for employers to create jobs.
And yet, the unemployment rate is at a six-year low, we’re on track for the best year for jobs since the Clinton era, and we just broke the record for the most consecutive months of private-sector job gains. For the right, this just shouldn’t be possible.
So how do Republicans reconcile the reality and their rhetoric? At least at Fox News, the answer is to ignore the inconvenient truths. Dylan Byers noted:
We won’t do the screen shots this time, but per usual FoxNews.com is the one major news site downplaying Thursday’s positive employment report. CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are all leading their sites with the news (in large fonts, no less). Fox News has it buried in fine print on a sidebar.
It’s hard to argue that such a decision is a matter of unbiased editorial judgment.
Ya think?
Given recent history – good news is ignored, bad news is trumpeted – it’s probably safe to assume the right’s not-so-subtle approach is intended to keep the bubble intact for conservative audiences.
But even funnier was House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) unintentionally hilarious statement in response to the new jobs report.
The headline clearly says the press released relates to the “June 2014 Unemployment Report,” but remarkably, the Speaker of the House managed to issue a statement that ignores the June 2014 Unemployment Report.
“The House has passed dozens of jobs bills that would mean more paychecks and more opportunities for middle-class families. But in order for us to make real progress, the president must do more than criticize. From trade to workplace flexibility, there’s no shortage of common ground where he can push his party’s leaders in the Senate to work with us. Until he provides that leadership, he is simply part of the problem. For our part, we will continue to listen to and address the concerns of Americans who are still asking ‘where are the jobs?’”
Look, it’s the day before a major national holiday. It’s quite possible that Boehner never even saw the job numbers and this statement was written days ago and released to the media by some poor intern stuck in a largely empty office.
But given the importance of jobs to the American public, is it really too much to ask that Boehner put a little effort into this? Let’s unpack the response to jobs data that managed to ignore jobs data:
* “The House has passed dozens of jobs bills.” Actually, it hasn’t. If you look at Boehner’s list of “jobs bills,” it’s primarily a bunch of bills written for and by the oil industry, encouraging drilling everywhere. Here’s the challenge for the Speaker’s office: put together a jobs bill, subject it to independent scrutiny, find out how many jobs it would create, and get back to us. We’ve been waiting for three years. It hasn’t happened.
* “[T]he president must do more than criticize.” Well, he has. Obama has sent real, independently scored bills that would create jobs. The House Republican majority has so far failed to even vote on them.
* “Until he provides that leadership, he is simply part of the problem.” Boehner is practically allergic to leadership, unable to convince his own far-right caucus to listen to him on most issues, making this a curious line of attack. Regardless, the president, unlike the hapless Speaker, has lowered unemployment and has presented real plans to expand on this progress. Can Boehner say the same?
* “For our part, we will continue to listen.” To whom? I can think of a whole lot of measures that Americans have urged Congress to pass, which Boehner has ignored entirely. Who exactly does the Speaker think he’s listening to?
* “[A]ddress the concerns of Americans who are still asking ‘where are the jobs?’” They’re right here. If the Speaker’s office looked at the jobs report before commenting on the jobs report, this would have been obvious.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 3, 2014
“Beltway Hyperventilators”: Those Media Hysterics Who Said Obama’s Presidency Was Dead Were Wrong, Again
It’s been a pretty good week for the Obama administration. The bungled healthcare.gov Web site emerged vastly improved following an intensive fix-it push, allowing some 25,000 to sign up per day, as many as signed up in all of October. Paul Ryan and Patty Murray inched toward a modest budget agreement. This morning came a remarkably solid jobs report, showing 203,000 new positions created in November, the unemployment rate falling to 7 percent for the first time in five years, and the labor force participation rate ticking back upward. Meanwhile, the administration’s push for a historic nuclear settlement with Iran continued apace.
All of these developments are tenuous. The Web site’s back-end troubles could still pose big problems (though word is they are rapidly improving, too) and the delay in getting the site up working leaves little time to meet enrollment goals. Job growth could easily stutter out again. The Iran deal could founder amid resistance from Congress or our allies.
Still, it seems safe to say that the Obama presidency is not, in fact, over and done with. What, you say, was there any question of that? Well, yes, there was – less than a month ago. On November 14, the New York Times raised the “K” word in a front-page headline:
President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
A day later, Dana Milbank gave an even blunter declaration of doom in the Washington Post:
There may well be enough time to salvage Obamacare.
But on the broader question of whether Obama can rebuild an effective presidency after this debacle, it’s starting to look as if it may be game over.
And Ron Fournier, the same week, explained in National Journal that things were so grim for Obama because his presidency had reached a kind of metaphysical breaking point:
Americans told President Obama in 2012, “If you like your popularity, you can keep it.”
We lied.
Well, at least we didn’t tell him the whole truth. What we meant to say was that Obama could keep the support of a majority of Americans unless he broke our trust. Throughout his first term, even as his job-approval rating cycled up and down, one thing remained constant: Polls showed that most Americans trusted Obama.
As they say in Washington, that is no longer operable.
Granted, finding overwrought punditry in Washington is about as difficult as hunting for game at one of Dick Cheney’s favorite preserves. Making grand declarations based on the vibrations of the moment is part of the pundit’s job description, and every political writer with any gumption is going to find himself or herself out on the wrong limb every once in a while. That said, this has been an especially inglorious stretch for Beltway hyperventilators. First came the government shutdown and the ensuing declamations about the crack-up of the Republican Party. Then, with whiplash force, came the obituaries for the Obama presidency. The Washington press corps has been reduced to the state of the tennis-watching kittens in this video, with the generic congressional ballot surveys playing the part of the ball flitting back and forth.
What explains for this even-worse-than-usual excitability? Much of it has to do with the age-old who’s-up-who’s down, permanent-campaign tendencies of the political media, exacerbated by a profusion of polling, daily tipsheets and Twitter. Overlaid on this is our obsession with the presidency, which leads us both to inflate the aura of the office and to view periods of tribulation as some sort of existential collapse. Add in the tendencies of even more serious reporters to get into a chew-toy mode with tales of scandal or policy dysfunction, as happened with the healthcare.gov debacle – the media has been so busy hyping every last aspect of the rollout’s woes that it did indeed start to seem inconceivable that things might get better soon.
But things did get better, as one should have been able to anticipate, given the resources and pressure that were belatedly brought to bear on the challenge. The fiasco took a real toll on the law and on the liberal project, for which Barack Obama bears real responsibility. But the end of a presidency? Take a deep breath, folks.
The sad thing about this spectacle isn’t even the predictable display of presentism. It’s the evident ignorance of the constitution and the basics of American politics. For the next three years, Obama will occupy the presidency, a position that comes with remarkable legal powers, especially now that he’s been partly liberated from the filibuster’s constraints. Washington columnists—the folks who presumably get paid to disseminate this kind of wisdom to the rubes beyond the Beltway—ought to know this better than anyone else, yet even as they fixate so much on the office’s aura, they are awfully quick to declare an administration defunct. News happens, and in the Oval Office, or the House majority, you always have the ability to influence it, even when you don’t deserve it. Kind of like certain well-known writers I could name.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, December 6, 2013
“Not Very Much”: Without The Economy, What Does Romney Have Left Against Obama?
Last Friday’s new job numbers demonstrate that Barack Obama has started to turn around the economy George W. Bush ran aground.
Don’t get me wrong. A 7.8 percent jobless rate is way too high. And the effective jobless rate which includes part-time workers who want full-time work and Americans who have given up hope of ever finding jobs is even worse.
But there have been 31 straight months of growth in the number of private sector jobs. The unemployment rate is still high but there has been a slow and steady decrease in the jobless rate. The picture is even brighter in the battleground states that will pick the next president. In Iowa, the unemployment rate is only 5.5, and it is 5.7 percent in New Hampshire. The unemployment rate would be even lower if the GOP majority in the House of Representatives had approved the president’s proposed American Jobs Act which would have given state and local governments the funds to rehire hundreds of thousands of the teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other public employees who had lost their jobs in the last few years.
One of the striking things about recent national surveys is that Americans now think that Barack Obama is as capable of handling the economy as Mitt Romney. The Battleground national poll conducted for George Washington University last week shows that there are almost as many voters (47 percent) who think President Obama is the best candidate to handle the economy as there are voters (49 percent) who think Romney is the better man for the job.
Romney’s business credentials were his ace in the hole but he played his hand poorly. The steady increase in employment has certainly helped restore trust in the president’s capacity to nourish the economy but the GOP nominee has undermined his own image as a successful entrepreneur.
Romney is his own worst enemy. The infamous “47 percent” video exposed Romney’s callous disregard for Americans like seniors and veterans who are economically dependent on government benefits. The video clearly had an impact on Romney’s standing. The Battleground survey shows the president with a big advantage (56 percent to 40 percent) over Romney for standing up for the middle class.
If the president does win re-election, I suspect that many pundits will say the 47 percent video was the turning point of the campaign. But I think the real pivot point was during the spring when the Obama campaign exposed what Rick Perry called Romney’s time at Bain Capital a career in “vulture capitalism.” At the time, most Democratic insiders dismissed the anti-Bain preemptive attack ads, but they put Romney on the defensive on the only issue that could help him win the campaign. The president also helped himself when he adopted an aggressive message of economic populism in the fall of 2011 after he finally got frustrated over Republican obstructionism.
Monday, Romney gave a speech on foreign policy at the Virginia Military Institute. He has talked about national security a lot lately, and the Romney campaign’s focus on foreign policy may be an admission by Romney that he has lost the edge he had over the president on the economy. Romney’s new emphasis on foreign policy is counterproductive since few voters care about it and because voters give the president good marks for international relations. According to the Battleground poll, few Americans indicate that the wars in the Middle East (4 percent) or terrorism (2 percent) are the most important issues in the campaign. By a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent, voters choose the president as the candidate best able to handle foreign policy.
A story in Politico on Tuesday indicated that the Romney family is pushing the candidate to de-emphasize his anti-Obama economic rhetoric. But if the GOP candidate stops beating up on the president for his economic performance, what does Romney have left? The answer is not very much.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 9, 2012
“God Must Be A Kenyan”: Hey Conspiracy Theorists, It’s Showtime!
I assume that several of our house conservatives have been sitting around this morning waiting for this post on the new BLS data so they can trot out their conspiracy theories or note that the “real” unemployment rate is 11 percent. So, go have fun.
I think it’s a little sad to see people so openly rooting against America and against people finding work. That much-discussed Jack Welch tweet was an abomination. As TNR’s Alec MacGillis tweeted back, it’s always nice to see a leading figure of American commerce cheer against his country and its economy. And “BLS cooked-the-numbers” theories are just silly. This monthly gathering of data is a massive job that goes on all month long involving thousands of people and inputs.
The great news about this report and the new jobless rate of 7.8 percent, down below 8 for the first time since Obama took office (how’s that for a stump-speech line?), is that it happened for the right reason: The labor force grew, meaning that more people are out there looking for work, which is a contrast to some previous months when the rate fell because the labor-force participation rate decreased. And the revisions to the last two months, adding 86,000 jobs, is especially heartening.
In substantive terms, it is certainly true that the participation rate is lower than it was in January 2009 by a couple percentage points. And it’s also true that 114,000, the new number, isn’t enough to keep up with the growth in the size of the labor force. So substantively, it’s not a great number.
But we’re in the home stretch of a presidential campaign. So politically, the number is really good for Obama. Just what he needed. God must be a Kenyan.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 5, 2012
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