In his May 3 Washington Examiner column, Mark Hemingway writes as one of “seven reasons not to vote for Democrats,” based on statements taken from “Democratic talking points”:
4. “Two million people or more have jobs today who wouldn’t have without the bold action taken by this president and Democrats in Congress.”
According to Pew, 62 percent of Americans say the $862 billion stimulus bill isn’t working. A recent National Association for Business Economics survey shows a majority of business economists think it didn’t create jobs. And Democrats want to tout their employment record by saying, “It could have been worse”?
Read that again. Hemingway is trying to refute a factual claim — a fact confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office and Moody’s Economy.com — by citing opinion polls.
Hemingway seems to think that what people perceive about something trumps reality, no matter what reality actually is. In this case, reality is pretty easy to determine; Hemingway has chosen to pretend that reality doesn’t exist.
The fact that Hemingway cites only a couple of opinion polls claiming the stimulus “isn’t working” suggests that he can’t find any actual facts making that claim. And admitting that Obama’s stimulus is working would run afoul of the Examiner’s right-wing tilt.