Keep your eye on Mitt
by digby
He may unaccountably make people’s skin crawl, but his message is the one that stands the best chance of giving Obama a run for his money in 2012:
Romney was one of the few speakers to mention Friday’s jobs report, and he wielded it like a cleaver to attack President Obama before a rapt audience in downtown DC.
“Hear what he said today?” Romney asked the crowd. He criticized Obama for calling the unexpectedly high jobless numbers “bumps on the road to recovery” in an Ohio speech earlier in the day.
“No, Mr. President, that’s not a bump,” Romney said. “That’s Americans.”
Romney called the continuing unemployment rate “a moral crisis that we face in this country,” that he says Obama has ignored.
“I don’t see it’s possible to solve a crisis, if you can’t see a crisis,” Romney said.
Can anyone really disagree with that? Obviously, you and I know that conservative austerity “solutions” to the problem are making things worse. But do the people understand that? I’m not sure they do. In fact, I would guess that most people think that the government is causing this continued high unemployment by not cutting spending rather than failing to raise it. Certainly, nobody is telling them what Matt Yglesias does in his piece linked above:
The private sector’s not being held back by the grasping arm of big government. Government is shrinking. And the shrinking of the government sector isn’t leading to any kind of private sector explosion. It’s simply offsetting meager private sector growth. Indeed, I’d say it’s holding it back. Fewer state and local government layoffs would mean more customers for private businesses and even stronger growth on the private side.
That’s right. What might have been just a slow, disappointing climb out of recession has become a jobless recovery of such epic proportions that it’s pushing the economy back down. It’s bad enough that Washington couldn’t find the gumption to stimulate the economy properly to begin with, it’s been laying off so many people in the public sector (often for purely ideological reasons) that it’s contributing heavily to the stall.
Yglesias again, in a different post, explains:
The federal government should have stepped in when the recession hit with generous bailouts to states and municipalities to help stabilize their budgets. Instead, an austerity-minded congress has been letting state governments sink. Then a new crop of budget cutting governors came to office determined to slash spending while trying to avoid responsibility for unpopular cuts. The result was to push a lot of budget pressure downward onto local government, where we’re seeing huge cutbacks even thought he population continues to grow.
I wrote about the Republican Orange County California wrecking crew the other day.I can hardly wait to see how that works out. But it’s happening all over the country both because of ideological insanity and sheer necessity and it’s dragging down the whole economy. And i don’t think even the smallest fraction of the country understands this.
Watch out for Mitt. He’s on to something. If he can get past the Tea drinking lunatics in his own party (and his own flip-flopping) he has a chance to make this a race. If they had a truly viable candidate to carry this message it would be politically dangerous to Obama. Sadly, I’m not sure it would make much difference in terms of economic policy.
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