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Soon there will be a SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit with Obama patting himself on the back. Jonathan Tobin takes note.
As we recalled a couple of days ago, Vice President Joe Biden’s one example of genuine wit that I’m aware of was his line that a Rudy Giuliani sentence consisted of a noun, a verb and 9/11. Those who listen to Biden’s boss are probably thinking about that painfully accurate quip every time he takes to the stump.
As Jackie Calmes of the New York Times notes in the paper’s Caucus blog today, President Obama’s standard speech about his administration has been revised in the last week. Every address, from commemorations to fundraisers in the last week has included a section where he takes credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to Calmes, this will “be a staple of his political message into the 2012 election.” …
Tony Blankley writes on dead Osama portion of the Obama campaign.
There is a particular media conceit that, in the garb of purported impeccable disclosure, is in fact a license for news sources to market talking points. A hilarious example of the breed can be found in an article by Anne E. Kornblut in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post. The article is about the White House’s intended use of the killing of Osama bin Laden and is titled “Bin Laden raid fits into Obama’s ‘big things’ message.”
The phrase in question comprises the italicized words in the following quote: “A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about internal thinking, said the White House is not developing a strategy to leverage the raid in other difficult arenas, such as the budget or debt-ceiling negotiations with the Republicans. The official insisted it would not change the overall message or approach of the 2012 campaign, which has long been described as a campaign focused on the economy. Still, it almost certainly will help a president elected on ‘hope’ and ‘change’ to shift his next campaign in a new direction.”
Of course, the entire point of the article was the opposite of what the unnamed official said: The White House staff is, in fact, itching to take political advantage of the bin Laden killing. Indeed, the constant quotes of clumsy denials of political calculations by senior White House officials are the artful leitmotif of the entire article. …
David Harsanyi says immigration reform is a Dem trick.
Immigration reform, huh? Well, President Obama did recently consult with Eva Longoria on this formidable policy conundrum. As goes Longoria, so goes the nation.
Then again, it certainly seems like a peculiar time to spring this divisive topic on the American people. Especially when we know full well that reform has a stimulus’s chance of success.
And weren’t we just talking about the $14 trillion debt? The budget you didn’t pass? Thuggery against Boeing? Debt ceilings? Medicare? According to a new NBC News poll, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy — an all-time high. So perhaps the discussion wasn’t helpful to the most vital imperative: electing Obama.
Remember that Obama promised to fight for reform legislation in his first year in office. Instead, Democrats used historic supremacy to cram through a number of legislative items that divided the nation — but no immigration policy. Latinos are imperative to presidents when running for office, less so when in it. Now, in the middle of the most consequential fiscal debate the nation has faced in memory, the administration shifts to immigration reform? We can guess why. …
Peter Wehner maintains the president will be vunerable in 2012. To make his point, we follow his post with articles on jobs from people who are in Obama Love; David Brooks (NY Times), Arianna Huffington (HuffPo), and Andy Kroll (Mother Jones). All of these efforts complain about the weakness in the jobs picture. These are Obama’s friends.
… We are now in the fifth month of Barack Obama’s third year in office. Unemployment is at 9.0 percent. We’re about 7 million jobs short of where things stood when Obama took office. Economic growth in the first quarter was 1.8 percent. Housing prices have fallen for 57 consecutive months. Only one in three Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the economy, the lowest point since he took office, and nearly eight in 10 American are less optimistic about the economy than they were a few months ago.
David Axelrod is anxious, and he’s right to be. His friend, the president, is caught in a political tractor beam from which few, if any, public officials escape. The only way to likely to overcome it is if the economy shows signs of a strong recovery. That has yet to happen, and one cannot help but think it may never happen, in the Obama presidency. If that ends up being the case—if a year from now the economy is more or less in the same condition as it was two years ago, last year, and what it is now—Obama will be the easiest incumbent to beat since 1980. It’s not impossible for Republicans to lose such an election, but it would be mighty hard.
Here’s David Brooks writing about the missing fifth of the male work force.
In 1910, Henry Van Dyke wrote a book called “The Spirit of America,” which opened with this sentence: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”
This has always been true. Americans have always been known for their manic dynamism. Some condemned this ambition as a grubby scrambling after money. Others saw it in loftier terms. But energy has always been the country’s saving feature.
So Americans should be especially alert to signs that the country is becoming less vital and industrious. One of those signs comes to us from the labor market. As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently, in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work.
According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do. …
A. Huffington gives a go at describing the economy.
… April’s numbers were equally disconcerting: even though the economy added 244,000 jobs, the unemployment rate rose from 8.8 percent to 9 percent. Even worse, the unemployment rate for African-Americans jumped to 16.1 percent. And for those over the age of 55, the average length of time spent looking for a job is now over a year.
Add to that an anemic GDP growth rate of 1.8 percent for January through March, down from 3.1 percent for the last quarter of 2010, and the fact that, according to U.S. Census numbers released last week, the percentage of young adults living with their parents has jumped to a staggering 34 percent, largely because of their limited job possibilities.
Then there is the chilling reality that more than 28 percent of U.S. homes were underwater in the first quarter of the year, and foreclosures are expected to rise 20 percent this year. “We get tired of telling such a grim story,” Zillow economist Stan Humphries told Bloomberg News, “but unfortunately this is the story that needs to be told.”
Told, but apparently not listened to. At least not in Washington.
It’s no wonder then that, according to a recent Gallup poll, over half the country currently believes we’re in a recession or a depression. Or that a New York Times/CBS poll shows that 80 percent say the economy is in fairly bad or very bad shape.
How are these not hair on fire numbers? …
And here’s Andy Kroll from Mother Jones on the “McJobs recovery.” All of this from Obama’s fans
Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald’s launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that’s more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire US economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald’s franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective [4] than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald’s hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million [5] more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages [6] around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.
On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald’s appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “McJob” as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”
Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward [7], from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward [8] in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs [9]), beating economists’ expectations.
Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery? …
IBD editors note the 40th anniversary of Amtrak.
This week, Amtrak marks its 40th anniversary, which means that for decades it’s wasted tens of billions of tax dollars. Naturally, Washington wants to reward this with billions more under the guise of “high-speed” rail.
To say that Amtrak is a failed business is to be unkind to failure. Consider: ..