Republicans are aggressively moving to counter President Obama’s cheering of recent economic gains with a laundry list of 24 major economic indicators from job losses to gas prices where life has soured for Americans despite the Democrat’s 2008 campaign promises.
In a campaign dubbed “The Big Fail,” the Republican National Committee is dishing bad news on multiple fronts from the president’s own agencies that describe the depressed economy Main Street America faces despite the slow economic turnaround corporate America is experiencing.
The RNC effort has hints of Ronald Reagan, especially when he asked voters in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter if they are better off than they were four years earlier, when Carter was elected. This time, the RNC is quoting Obama, who in 2008 asked voters: “The question in this election is not ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ We know the answer to that. The real question is, ‘Will this country be better off four years from now?’”
The president’s team says yes, though not as good as he had hoped for because the recession he took over from former President George W. Bush was deeper and harder to break than expected. Obama’s campaign notes that “after inheriting an economy that was shedding more than 750,000 jobs a month when the president took office, we’ve now had two straight years of job growth. While it’s certainly encouraging, we all know there’s much more that needs to be done.” And, the campaign adds, auto companies that received stimulus loans are thriving and home mortgages are at historic lows. They’ve got the charts to prove it.
But the RNC’s answer is no and they’ve got the facts and figures to back that up, all presented today in a new memo.
Highlights from their report card of 24 areas:
— 14,241,059 on food stamps since Obama’s Inauguration.
— $15,316 is each American’s share of the national debt since he took office.
— 103.5 percent increase in gas prices.
— 15.9 percent of Americans living in poverty.
