On Jobs, Obama is Running from Reality

RedState ^ | 6/1/2012 | Rance Priebus



Today’s extremely troubling jobs report is yet another sad reminder that President Obama’s policies simply are not working—and that we need a president who understands the economy.
Last night on CNN former President Bill Clinton praised Mitt Romney’s “sterling” career in the private sector. This morning Steny Hoyer echoed that sentiment, underscoring the importance of the private sector in growing our economy. While Mitt Romney’s sterling record demonstrates that he knows what it takes to fix our economy, today’s jobs report shows that President Obama’s record is irreparably tarnished.
In short, President Obama has failed to live up to the promise of his candidacy. In 2009, he and his team promised an unemployment rate below 6 percent by 2012. We’re far from it.
And now, President Obama talks about the economy as though he has not been president for the last three years.
“It is absolutely critical,” he said Wednesday, to make sure the economy is “moving full speed ahead.”
Yes, it is. But Obama has spent the last three years holding us back. The president yells, “Forward!” even as he moves backward.
For the weak economy, we can thank Obama’s weak leadership. Instead of pursuing policies that would help job creators put Americans back to work, he’s burdened them with ObamaCare, regulations, and continued threats of higher taxes.
But don’t take my word for it.
Listen to former Congressman Artur Davis, a 2008 Obama National Co-Chair who this week left the Democrat Party: “I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again.”
Not only has President Obama presided over a devastating economy, but he also refuses to hold himself accountable for it. In 2009, however, he was singing a different tune. If he didn’t have the economy fixed “in three years,” he promised, his presidency would be a “one-term proposition.”
It’s been three years, but instead of accepting responsibility, the president casts blame elsewhere—ATMs, earthquakes, airport kiosks, and “bad luck,” among other scapegoats.
In May, he issued Congress a “to-do list,” his latest attempt to distract from his own incomplete task: job creation. And today, the president is in Minnesota to talk about the post-it size list.
While he will go to the trouble of traveling to Minnesota to speak about this political prop, he apparently has not gone to the trouble of looping in members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Democrat Senators Mary Landrieu, Bob Casey, and Carl Levin admitted to Roll Call they don’t even know what’s on it.
If he has not taken the time to inform his friends at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Obama must not be too serious about his little list.
No, he’s more concerned about another to-do list: his list of campaign fundraisers. Today, he will attend six of them. He has already attended far more fundraisers for his re-election than his predecessors, 147 in total.
Even as he passes the buck, Obama is happy to rake in the bucks. The promises for his first term ignored, he’s thinking exclusively about a second term.
But unemployed Americans are still worried about the present. As today’s jobs report makes clear, far too many Americans are out of work, without enough work, or giving up on looking for work altogether.
President Obama is working hard to keep his job. It’s just a shame he’s not working as hard to ensure unemployed Americans can find jobs for themselves.