ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Something We Can Say With Certitude: The Economy Stinks!
Now the numbers are so bad — and November 2012 so close — that the Obama campaign has decided it must, as Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Glenn Thrush put it, “temper some of the Morning-in-America optimism he’d hoped to run on.”
This is truly shocking. Not that the president’s team realizes its “Morning-in-America” parade is getting rained on, but that marching under that banner was ever considered in the first place. Even if the jobs numbers had come in as expected, at 150,000 — or even if they’d come in higher than expected at, say, 200,000, and stayed there for several months, we’re nowhere near Morning in America. Unfortunately, too much of the country appears to be closer to a Permanent Midnight.
As our Business Editor Peter Goodman puts it, the conditions underlying these numbers are “already familiar beyond the realm of professional economists and policymakers.” This is what most Americans, Goodman writes, “know in their bones, not from government reports and the abstract musings of economists, but from the everyday fears that accompany glancing at their checkbooks and their latest credit card bills: There is no relief in sight.”
Certainly not from this administration. Plus this:
For the administration to be credible in putting forth a jobs vision for the future it has to credibly acknowledge what’s happened in the past. And its plan will have to go beyond simply blaming its predecessors. “It could have been worse!” is not much of a battle cry.
Nope. Especially when it’s actually much worse than the Administration predicted things would be even without its ill-conceived, pork-laden stimulus plan.
UPDATE: Well, this won’t help: Obama defaults to economic blame game. “A cascade of bad economic and political news knocked President Barack Obama off his game today, and prompted him to revive his 2008-style criticism of his predecessor, and also to suggest that investors, consumers and even the media are responsible for today’s stalled economy.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Grant writes: “Why doesn’t Obama just come out and say it? ‘It’s the voters’ fault, they trusted me.'”
Ah, yes, the Flounder Defense.
MORE: Reader Ron Hardin emails: “The Obama private-sector economic recovery plan: beatings will continue until morale improves.”