We noted last month that President Obama was waging a “shiny objects” campaign against his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. Ever since the GOP primary contest effectively ended in April, Team Obama and its media allies have repeatedly focused on trivialities such as the manufactured GOP “War on Women,” gay marriage and Romney’s high school years. Last week, the new shiny object was Romney’s relationship with Donald Trump.
Why is Obama doing this? On Friday, we received a fresh reminder when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released yet another dismal jobs report. Obama knows that if the focus of the election is the economy and his failure to keep his explicit promises to improve it, he will lose.
The U.S. economy added just 69,000 jobs in May, well below the expected 150,000. In addition to that huge miss, the BLS also revised downward the already-weak job creation totals of the two previous months by a combined 49,000 jobs — an 18 percent reduction overall. The unemployment rate crept up slightly to 8.2 percent. And these terrible jobs numbers followed an alarming downward revision in the first-quarter gross domestic product to a tepid 1.9 percent growth rate.
In response to the weak jobs numbers, Obama and his aides and surrogates immediately switched to “blame Congress” mode. Appearing on CNBC an hour after the jobs report came out Friday morning, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis pointed the finger at Congress on four different occasions during an eight-minute interview. “I think the Congress has to take some action,” she said. “We need the cooperation. We need to be proactive.” Alan Krueger, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, had a similar message on MSNBC, saying, “We would be in a much stronger position had Congress acted on the president’s [economic] proposal.”
This line of attack requires incredible gall. For after coming into office in January 2009, with Democrats in firm control of both chambers of Congress, Obama got nearly everything he wanted legislatively. He got his $831 billion economic stimulus package, more than 90 percent of which had been spent by the end of this March, according to the Congressional Budget Office. He got his national health care law. He got his sweeping financial regulatory legislation.
On top of that, the Federal Reserve has pursued an expansionary monetary policy that should have helped Obama’s cause. But after more than three years, his policies have failed to initiate a recovery. The nation will never enjoy a robust recovery as long as Obama continues to pile regulatory burdens on businesses, increase government spending and debt, and hike taxes on job creators.
On Friday afternoon, Obama gave a speech in Minnesota, once again dinging Congress for not having passed his “jobs bill” and his tax-hiking budget. Incredibly, the candidate whose campaign would rather discuss Donald Trump than his own economic record declared, “My message to Congress is: Now is not the time to play politics.” Indeed, Mr. President. You first.
