Willard Is Misleading The Voters About Jobs

Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie) and his running mate & campaign spokesmen have been telling Americans a couple of things about employment that they hope make it look like the president has been unable to handle the economic crises he inherited, especially when it comes to job creation. They have been saying that the unemployment rate is still higher than it was when he entered office, and that the net number of jobs (jobs created minus jobs lost) was zero under President Obama.

In spite of what a lot of my progressive brothers and sisters would like to believe, both of those statements are actually true. The current unemployment rate is 7.8%, while the unemployment rate in January of 2009 was 7.6% (as shown by the Labor Department chart above). And while 4.3 million jobs have been created under President Obama, that just equals the number of jobs that were lost in the first months of his presidency. But just looking at those facts without considering the entire picture is very misleading.

What they won't tell you is the full story -- that the last Republican president (George Bush) left this country in a real economic mess. It was the biggest economic disaster that any president has inherited since the mess Herbert Hoover left Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. The nation had been plunged into a serious recession and as the recession gained steam, more jobs were being lost each month. The recession was like a giant ball rolling downhill and picking up steam, and there was nothing the president (or any president of either party) could have done to prevent the unemployment situation from getting worse in 2009.

Willard wants us to think that the president should have completely fixed that economy in four years. That's laughable. Even Franklin Roosevelt wasn't able to fix everyone his Republican predecessors had messed up in only four years (even with a strong Democratic majority in Congress), and to suggest that President Obama should have done that economically impossible task in a mere four years is more than a bit disingenuous. But amazingly, President Obama has finally stopped that ball from rolling further downhill, and is now laboring to push it back up that hill.

He has stopped the rise in unemployment and spurred the creation of over 4.3 million jobs -- more jobs than were created during the eight years of the Bush administration. He has seen the jobs lost since 2009 completely replaced by new jobs. What he has been unable to do yet, is go even further and replace the jobs lost during the Bush administration. But that will happen soon, since this year has seen an average growth in jobs of about 146,000 jobs a month. And he has done all of that while the Republicans have tried to block any attempts he made to put the nation back on track to a healthy economy.

During the first weeks of President Obama's presidency, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate met and agreed to obstruct anything the president tried to do to make things better. They knew they couldn't defend what their own party did to the economy, so they vowed to keep the economy from improving to make it look like President Obama (and his Democratic cohorts) were equally bad. And they did exactly what they had sworn to do. They became the "party of no" and did their best to defeat anything the president proposed. In the first two years, they did it by misusing the Senate filibuster rule (using it far more than at any time in this nation's history), and after the 2010 election they defeated the president's proposals with their majority in the House.

Now Willard and his running mate want to put all of the blame for the faltering economy on the president, when the truth is that most of the blame rests on the congressional Republicans, who put their party and ideology above what was good for the country and refused to compromise on anything. Now they want to return the country to the failed economic policies of the Bush administration (with wars not paid for, new tax cuts for the rich, continued outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, deregulation of Wall Street, and suppression of worker wages).

Even when Willard tells the truth (which is rare), he is misleading -- and uses the few facts he has to try and lead this country back down the path to economic destruction (just so he and his rich buddies can have more tax cuts). If we put him in office, we will deserve the disaster that follows.