House Ways & Means Hits Obama On "One-Term Proposition" Promise, But Is It Good Enough?

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The House Ways & Means Committee hit Barack Obama on the third anniversary on Barack Obama’s promise to Matt Lauer that if he didn’t make “progress” on the economy, well, that would be that. “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition,” he told Lauer.

Ways & Means has released a fact sheet with indicators of how bad the economy has fared under Barack Obama. They don’t really note anything new, but do a good job putting it all together:

• In January 2009, the Obama Administration claimed that with their stimulus plan there would be 137.6 million jobs at the end of 2010. But even a full year later at the end of the 2011, there were just 131.9 million jobs in the U.S. economy — 5.7 million jobs short of what they forecast in January 2009. The pace of job creation is the slowest since jobs data were first recorded in the 1930s.

• Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 35 consecutive months, the longest since the Great Depression. Today’s 8.5% unemployment rate remains far above the 6.2% rate the Administration predicted in their January 2009 Romer Bernstein Report. Including the “invisible” unemployed (that is, discouraged workers who either dropped out of or never joined the labor force), the December 2011 unemployment rate would actually be almost 11 percent. The unemployment rate for Americans without a high school diploma was 13.8 percent in December 2011. Recent research shows that “Workers with less than a high school degree are almost four times as likely to be unemployed than workers with a college degree” and “a much higher share of all workers with less than a high school degree actually face long-term unemployment.”

• In December 2011, 13.1 million Americans were unemployed, one million more than when President Obama took office in January 2009.

• In December 2011, 5.6 million Americans were long-term unemployed (i.e. for over six months). That’s more than double the number when President Obama took office.

• The “Obama Misery Index” shows unemployment and debt combined have risen by nearly 75% since the start of the Obama Administration.

• The President has taken to blaming the American people for supposedly losing “our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do” major infrastructure projects like building the Golden Gate Bridge, when the facts show his own failed “shovel ready” stimulus policies are the real cause.

This is good work, but House Ways & Means ought to do better. As Joseph Stalin would have put it, “The unemployment of one man is a tragedy, the unemployment of millions is a statistic.”

The Republican party needs to do a better job of personalizing this conflict. After all, when they had Joe the Plumber arguing against Obama, they were leading in the polls.

We need to show the everyday man suffering under Barack Obama’s rule. Show the businessman who lost everything because of regulation, show the college student who can’t get a job because of Obama’s shortsighted policies. Find them on their own emotional terms and win.