What Republicans won't tell you...
With the economy improving, you're going to hear a lot about how Obama hindered economic recovery and that, under his watch, we still lost a million-plus jobs.
They'll try to weasel their way through this by stating that it's factually correct - because the numbers, in fact, did come under Obama's leadership.
Unfortunately, it's not fair and extremely deceptive. It is true that job loss under Obama was massive, specifically in 2009 & 2010. That can't be debated - most of the jobs lost from the '08 recession came after Obama became president.
But you can't blame him.
Doing so would be entirely dishonest. Of course, these are Republicans we're talking about, so it's no surprise they'd use dishonest tactics.
The reality is - most of the job loss seen under Obama came extremely early into his term as president. In fact, the month he took the Oath of Office (Jan. 20th), turned out to be the worst month for job loss in modern American history. The economy shed over 800,000 jobs alone in that month.
800,000!
That is a staggering number.
So, essentially, Obama inherited an economy that had already lost an entire city's worth of employment in one month. That's essentially the entire city of Jacksonville, Florida disappearing, vanishing into the night, never to be seen of again.
Worse, the trend wasn't just going to abruptly end because we had a new president. It takes time for any plan to be passed, implemented and its impact felt.
By February, there was only marginal improvement - and still over 700,000 jobs lost. March was worse and so was April.
In the first four months of Obama's administration, America lost almost 3 million jobs.
That's about the size of Los Angeles.
Because we lost so many jobs in such a short amount of time, unemployment inevitably saw a huge spike. It's only common sense that if you shed nearly three million jobs in only four months (and that doesn't even count the millions lost over an entire year in '08), unemployment is going to rise and it's going to remain high for a very long time.
But you see, something happened in early '09 the Republicans want to ignore. As the stimulus started taking effect, fewer and fewer jobs were lost.
Still, jobs were lost. Republicans are absolutely right - in 2009, the entire year was spent underwater.
Yet no one could have ever expected to go from 800,000 jobs lost in the month of January to 800,000 jobs gained by the end of '09. It just wasn't going to happen. It takes time to crawl out of a recession - especially the one of that magnitude.
All you have to do is look back to the early 00 recession under Bush to see that things just don't fix overnight.
That's from Jan. '01 (when Bush became president) to Jan. '04 (the beginning of an election year). Look how long it took for Bush to see any positive sustained job growth in his first term after what could be classified a far more mild recession than what we saw at the end of his administration.
Things would pick up in 2004, but that was only after he spent most of his three years with dismal job gains. He won reelection, of course, in part because there appeared to be a pickup in '04 after the recession and, of course, on the back of his supposed foreign policy street cred.
But the graph paints the story: In Bush's first term, he saw minimal growth.
With a lesser recession and thus easier path back to prosperity, the economy struggled through three years of no-growth and while it did start picking up in '04 and that continued until '07, as we all know, it wasn't lasting.
So, I think there is a clear picture emerging here. Obama's first year was horrible. But his plans helped push us toward solid job growth that eventually turned into a two-year period where we've seen positive job gains and that still doesn't count '12.
For Bush, that didn't happen. There weren't consecutive years of total job gains until his final year of his first term and the first year of his second term.
Obama has, even with the worst recession in modern American history, far outpaced what Bush was doing in his first four years as president.
Yes, unemployment is higher and yes, more jobs were lost initially under Obama than Bush in his first three years. But it's hard to lay that at the feet of Obama when he saw more jobs lost in the month he took office than Bush saw in the entire first three years of his administration. And that's not a positive statement about Bush - it just goes to show how fucked we were on Jan. 20th, 2009. We were literally on the cusp of economic apocalypse. It was about to get all Mad Max up in this country until Obama stepped in and righted the ship.
Because of Obama, this has happened:
Now, this is the chart Republicans DO NOT WANT YOU TO SEE. It terrifies them because it shows how effective Obama has been at getting this country back to work.
But they know it's something they can't hide. With every positive jobs report, they're quick to point to the fact the unemployment rate is still too high and that Obama still saw record amount of job loss in his first year as president.
True and true.
But it's disingenuous because much of that was completely out of Obama's control. The unemployment rate was going to spike to record levels regardless because the market took a huge hit of job loss in 2008 & 2009. It can't recover from that as quickly as Republicans want to pretend it would have had Obama not been elected president.
And that's their message now. They can't win by saying Obama is running the economy into the ground (evidence obviously doesn't suggest that) - no, they're going to run on a hypothetical that no one can really disprove because it never happened.
Their argument will be that Obama made the economy worse...before, somehow, it magically decided to fix itself!
Apparently, the economy can just fix itself! And that's what it did. I guess the economy just decided one day it was tired of being in a recession and that it wanted to get people back to work, so it decided to create jobs again! Oh that economy, always keeping us on our toes. How silly of anyone to think the government, politicians, Republicans and Democrats, infighting, tax cuts, stimulus packages, executive orders and tax breaks could ever have an impact on the economy. Nope - it's all up in the air anyway! Somehow Obama can make the economy worse with his policies...but still, the economy is so powerful that it can just shake those shackles and grow on its own - OBAMA BE DAMNED!
It was like, "I'm gonna be independent, b*tch and do this all on my own..."
The economy went f'n rouge!
Of course, Democrats have heard this before. FDR is often credited for, wait for it, making the Great Depression worse.
Had he not implemented any of his New Deal policies, unemployment would have dropped significantly in those first few years. The economy only eventually grew in spite of him and because of World War II.
That's the Republican logic - the economy, when it's bad, is entirely bad because of the Democrats and when it's good, well it's only good because either they passed legislation to make it good (see the 90s) or it's improving in spite of the current president (see FDR or Obama).
Now they can't take credit for the economy like they did in the 90s because they haven't passed a goddamn jobs bill since squatting in the capitol, so they have to find another way of taking credit away from Obama and that's what they'll do. Mitt Romney has already gone there and expect them to continue to go there with every positive jobs report.
Finally, it's interesting to me how Republican points evolve. In early '09, when the stock market was at its worst, Obama was consistently blamed for it. He owned it, they said! It was his stock market now, warts and all and he was tanking it! Oh that silly socialist Obama was so awful for business that within a year no corporation would exist and the market would inevitably plunge into the depths of darkness.
I remember shortly after the turbulent first couple of months the stock market saw, this cartoon got a lot of play...
But that downfall was short lived. As we all know, the market quickly rebounded and FOX News went from this:
To this:
And then they quickly forgot about it.
The reality is, since that turbulent early '09, the stock market has slowly, and sometimes rapidly, begun to make back the gains lost prior to the economic collapse of '07.
Funny how Obama was crucified for early stock problems and now gets so little credit for not plunging our country back into a financial crisis.
The Republicans don't want Americans to know these things because it will completely undermine their argument. They'll pretend that somehow Obama is responsible for the 800,000 jobs lost in January '09, even though he had been president all of a couple weeks when that jobs report was released. They'll pretend his policies led to the major job losses early in '09, even though evidence points to an increase in employment over a prolonged period leading up to positive job growth from 2010 onward.
Even Mitt Romney admits Obama didn't create this recession. Unfortunately, he misinforms by suggesting Obama made it worse. If Obama had made it worse, the jobs lost at the end of his first year would have been worse than the jobs lost at the start of his first year.
That wasn't the case, though.
= new reply since forum marked as read
