The belt-tightening boomerang

The belt-tightening boomerang

by digby

Fox Nation tweeted that this is Obama’s “greatest gaffe ever”:

We’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the past 27 months. Over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing problems is with state and local government, often with cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help they’re accustomed to from the federal government.

It is, of course, true. But in political bizarroworld, telling the truth is a gaffe.

Now, it’s hard for me to feel tooo sorry for the president when he gets the “Obama says the private sector is doing fine!” treatment from the press and the Republicans because he was the one talking about “tightening our belts” and freezing government hiring for months, making it sound as though government must slash spending in the middle of a recession. That was a big mistake, not because it changed the policies — the Republicans were hardly going to allow any more stimulus. What it did was create a bipartisan consensus that government should be cut — after all, the president and the Republicans agreed, didn’t they? And now we’re stuck with it.

Still, this is going to be a particularly frustrating brouhaha. Of course the president is right that the private sector is doing ok and it’s government cutting spending that’s causing the depression. But I’m not sure how much it benefits him to point it out at this late date.

Update: Also too — he should have said “doing better” rather than “doing fine” which isn’t the way people feel and sounds odd to the ear. Plus it isn’t actually working up to capacity, so “fine” is more optimistic than it should be.

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