Private-sector job growth is ane mic, new jobless claims are still well over 400,000, the unemployment numbers are grim, manufacturing has slowed to a crawl, home prices are falling again, the dollar keeps sinking, 44 million people are now on food stamps, layoffs continue, consumer confidence has hit the skids and the stock market lost 280 points Wednesday and 38 more yesterday.
Welcome to Recovery Summer II.
Meanwhile, Washington is enmeshed in the debt-limit fight, with Aug. 2 as the latest supposed drop-dead date for raising the nation’s credit-card limit. Tuesday, in a 318-97 bipartisan landslide, the House rejected the administration’s request for a “clean bill” — one with no spending cuts attached — to extend the debt ceiling from $14.3 trillion to $16.7 trillion; 82 Democrats voted with the Republicans.
For what it’s worth, Moody’s is warning that, absent some agreement to avoid short-term default, it may downgrade the nation’s credit rating. “We are on the verge of a great, great Depression,” charged analyst Peter Yastrow.
And where was President Obama as this disastrous week began? Just back from a European mini-vacation, he was out on the links again on Memorial Day, playing his 70th round of golf since he took office. Leading from behind, anybody?
“Leadership should come from the top,” Rep. Paul Ryan is said to have told Obama the other day, when the president met privately with congressional Republicans to discuss deficit reduction.
Others in the room characterized the talks as “frank” and “productive” — diplomatic speak for contentious and heated.
Good. This is an argument the country desperately needs to have.
Two years into the Obama administration, the country’s finances are a looming calamity. An unemployment rate of more than 8 percent has become the new normal, and even that understates real unemployment, because so many Americans have simply left the job market.
The $800 billion stimulus was a complete failure, unless you count “government jobs saved” as a useful goal. “Quantitative easing” — the Federal Reserve’s printing money to buy Treasury debt — has already failed twice, yet it’s being contemplated again.
And does anyone doubt Obama and the Democrats would have hiked taxes last fall had they not suffered such a humiliating defeat in the 2010 election?
We’re heading for disaster on an epic scale, yet the president’s poll numbers have ticked up modestly, and surveys show that he remains personally popular, despite his ruinous policies. Therein lies the Republican challenge for 2012: how to tie the disastrous effects of Obama’s economic program to the man himself and make the electorate understand they’re one and the same.
Because by now it’s impossible for the Democrats to argue that the country’s on the right track or that their economic program hasn’t been given enough time to work. Nothing they publicly promised has come true, and this is before the ship of state hits the looming iceberg of ObamaCare, whose rollback still must be a top GOP priority.
“Leading from behind” — a phrase used by an anonymous Obama adviser in an interview with The New Yorker — is not getting the job done. After two years of unelected czars, increasingly burdensome regulations, executive orders, unread bills rammed through Congress, photo ops, White House parties, international vacations and an endless succession of speeches as the solution to every ill, Americans are hungering for leadership.
The candidate who can best frame the argument as one of national economic survival — and who won’t hesitate to take the fight to the other side — is the one who will be the next president.
Because leading from the front beats leading from behind every time — especially when the fate of the nation is at stake.