by Al Franken
I think most of you know me. I'm the poster boy for close elections.
As you may remember, I won my 2008 Senate campaign after a long recount by just 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast. That's a margin of about 1/100th of one percent. So I can tell you from personal experience that every vote counts.
And every vote in Congress counts, too. I'm proud of the vote I cast for health care reform that expands access to medical care while reducing the deficit. That's right: health care reform will reduce the national debt by over a hundred billion dollars over the next ten years, and by 1.5 trillion dollars over the following ten.
But, voters wouldn't know that health care reform reduces the deficit from the campaign ads the conservatives are airing, or from those shady third party ads. I call them shady, because they're shady. They operate in the dark.
Those ads tell you that the stimulus package has been a total failure. That's interesting. Because none other than John McCain's presidential campaign economic adviser, Mark Zandi, has done a comprehensive study of the recovery package and determined that it has created or saved three million jobs and, get this, averted a depression. Averted a depression.
Now, I don't know about our opponents in this election, but I'd say that averting a second Great Depression is, on balance, a very good thing.
Look, people are hurting. Millions of Americans are without jobs. Still struggling, still losing their homes, still anxious about the future.
But let's remember how we got here. The month Barack Obama was sworn in we lost 750,000 jobs in this country. With all due respect to the President, I think his analogy that the economy was a car in a ditch when he took office is just a little too static. Here's my analogy, which, in my opinion, is both more kinetic and, frankly, far more accurate.
When the President took office, not only had the car gone into a ditch, the car had flipped over and was rolling down a steep embankment. We, the American people, were in the back seat, and the Bush Administration had removed all the seat belts, so we were all flying around the interior of this car as it was rolling and flipping and careening down this steep embankment, headed to a 2,000 foot cliff. And at the bottom of that cliff were jagged rocks. And alligators.
Now, at noon on January 20th, 2009, as the car was careening toward the cliff, George W. Bush jumped out of the car.
President Obama somehow managed to dive in through the window, take the wheel and get control of the thing just inches before it went over the precipice. Then, he and Congress starting pushing this wreck back up the embankment. Now you can't push a car up an embankment as fast as it careens down the embankment, especially if some people are trying to push against you. But we got it going in the right direction. And slowly we've gotten ourselves up the embankment, out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the road.
There. That's what happened.
more
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
