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RUSH: The media doing what they can to spin this for Obama, we have here a montage. We got PMSNBC’s Kristen Welker, Deutsch advertising’s Donny Deutsch — we have Scarborough on MSNBC, somebody from Bloomberg TV, Betty Liu — and a couple of other people here talking about the unemployment numbers.
WELKER: Make no mistake about it, these numbers put the president in a vulnerable position for 2012.
DEUTSCH: (haltingly) This … president … is … incredible … vulnerable.
SCARBOROUGH: The president has so few good options right now.
LIU: Certainly, uh, an — an opportunity to criticize the Obama administration on jobs.
SIMON HOBBS: No US president has EVAH been reelected with unemployment above 8%.
CHRIS WALLACE: It’s very, very bad news for Barack Obama.
RUSH: Actually I think it’s 7.2% is the new number now, and the last president who was was FDR. And so the regime is saying, “Well, that cuts both ways, you know, ’cause we’re the new FDR! So we’re very, very proud of this.” You see? Vulnerable. But once again, you people are on the cutting edge, because last week you were assured President Obama was vulnerable. You were assured last week that Obama is beatable. These people actually think he’s a shoo-in, up until this week when the stock market crashed — well, it didn’t crash — everything just imploded, all their signs, they really thought he was a shoo-in. Republicans, half of them thought he was a shoo-in. Unbeatable.
And now listen to ’em. And next week they’ll change. If there’s any rebound in the economic news, all it would take is one economic statistic showing an uptick and they’ll be right pack, “He’s unbeatable! Hey, look what he did in less than five days: Removed all of the vulnerability from the equation, he’s back, which they can’t wait to report.” Skip number three. I have decided, you know, Jay Carney’s got enough problems without having to be embarrassed being heard by millions of people in this audience. So we’ll skip the Jay Carney sound bites. Here’s CNN “American Morning,” the chief business correspondent Ali Velshi and Christine Romans, the business correspondent. They had this little exchange about the May employment numbers, they’re shocked, they’re dismayed, they’re trying to understand.
VELSHI: Just in to CNN: The May jobs report, and it’s disappointing.
ROMANS: (dejected) Unemployment rate going up slightly to 9.1%, but what’s really disappointing to people is that after three months of gains on average of 220,000 jobs a month, we only saw 54,000 jobs added in the month of May.
VELSHI: Disappointing week in general in the economy. A number, duhh, like this is substantially lower.
ROMANS: You know, the pace couldn’t be continued. It was natural to think that the pace of job creation that we had seen was likely not to continue, had to throttle back a bit.
VELSHI: But the applications are still in the 150 to 175,000 range, now to come in at 54,000, this was the one thing we were looking at to say, “This economy is real.”
RUSH: Oh, yeah, they wanted to say it was “real.” It hasn’t been real; there hasn’t been a recovery — and I don’t get off saying that, you know? I don’t revel pointing this out. “Well, everybody knew the pace couldn’t be continued.” What pace? Creating 220,000, 180,000? We damn well better get to the point where we are creating 400 or 500,000 jobs a month, or this is all history. We are toast. I mean, that’s what we’re looking at here for a genuine recovery to bring everybody back within a certain number of years, it’s gonna take that kind of job creation. The number out there, it’s gonna take 400,000 a month, it’s gonna take half million a month.
By the way, Biden promised us we’d already be at that level by now. That’s what it’s gonna take to get us back to where we were at 2006, 2007 levels, folks — and there’s not a soul alive that has any confidence that we’re gonna get back to 400, 500,000 new jobs a month with these policies. Just isn’t gonna happen. It isn’t possible. And everybody knows it, including those in the regime. They know it. Everybody knows that the policies that we are hearing about which are designed in the name of recovery, they’re not growing anything. No growth is taking place. Here’s Scarborough making it plain here that he knows he works at MSNBC and making it plain here that he’s not one of us. Don’t think of him as some wacko right-winger.
SCARBOROUGH: So much of the exclusive growth in the late nineties was based on a bubble, an Internet bubble — and then so much of the growth during the Bush years was based on a real estate bubble. We have been… (stammering) It — it — it — it’s been… You — you g-g-go… You have to go back to the early 1990s to see where this country actually innovated in a big, transformational way. You can’t say, “Oh, the numbers are bad; this is Barack Obama’s fault,” or, “This is the Republicans’ fault.” This is a much bigger issue.
RUSH: No, you can say that. You can say that it’s Obama’s fault — and, you know, we like Joe Scarborough here, don’t misunderstand. I’m not picking on Scarborough, and I was not picking on Krauthammer yesterday, either. I got some vicious e-mails, probably from seminar e-mailers, just three or four of them that said, “You know, I’ve been listening to you for 20 years and I never heard you so petty; I never heard you so jealous.” I wasn’t ripping Krauthammer at all yesterday. I was quoting from an American Thinker piece. But you can’t blame Obama for these numbers? Joe, come on! Daniel Henninger, the Wall Street Journal: “Obama’s Cloud Economy.”
The pull quote: “It is sometimes unfair to tag presidents with blame for an underperforming economy. Not this time. This president made conscious policy choices during a deep recession to reorder vast swaths of American industry. Strong-performing economies need clarity,” and there isn’t any here. Nobody in small or large business has any idea what the rules are gonna be six months from now. “The economy,” says Mr. Henninger, “is flying without instruments because of the White House’s policy choices,” and see, that takes us back to what was very timely monologue yesterday about the silliness that you can somehow take issue with Obama’s policies, but you can’t take issue with him. He is his policies.
The man is — any politician is — the sum total of his policies, and when you go in to vote, by the way, what are you voting on? Names, right? Candidates are on the ballot by name, not by issue. “You just know the American economy is out there somewhere,” Henninger opens. “If only someone knew which buttons to push to retrieve it from the storage cloud. Here are three headlines that floated by on yesterday morning’s screens alone: ‘U.S. Manufacturing Growth Slows Substantially’ ‘Housing Imperils Recovery’ ‘Private Sector Added Few Jobs in May’ Let it be noted for the record that presidents normally do not take ownership of a weak economy.
“Jimmy Carter owned the 1980 election-year economy. George H.W. Bush owned the 1992 election-year economy. Both were one-term presidents. Happily for his opponents, Barack Obama has taken ownership of the 2011 economy, a full year and half before he has to face the voters. The Obama self-confidence is famously limitless. Still, a doubter might ask if President Obama hasn’t suffered his John McCain moment on the economy. John McCain’s presidential bid blew up for good when he announced in September 2008 that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to address the national financial crisis.”
That was it for McCain. He “suspended the campaign.” Never recovered. McCain had nothing to contribute. Do you remember what happened at that meeting? (interruption) Well, I don’t know if Obama “took charge,” but it was reported that he “took charge.” The story was, “Obama took charge of the meeting.” The story was, “Bush couldn’t even stop Obama, he was such a commanding presence! Why, Obama went in there and he’s the guy that had all the answers.” That’s what was reported, and they released ubiquitous McCain sitting there seemingly not knowing where he was. That was the message conveyed in the pictures, so, “Bye-bye, McCain campaign” at that point. The White House thus, at that point, passed to Barack Obama.
“Mr. Obama’s McCain moment — raising expectations of economic seriousness and then dropping them over the cliff — was his hyperpartisan deficit speech at George Washington University in April. The day before that speech, all Washington expected Mr. Obama to make a major policy statement about the big deficit-reduction debate then unfolding. Agree or disagree, Paul Ryan’s budget released the week before was all about policy. The Republicans were actually offering to take part-ownership of the economy by spending the year in dense discussions about the deficit and spending.” That’s an interesting way for Henninger to put this. They were willing to take “part ownership of the economy,” willing to risk political capital.
I mean, here your opponent is self-immolating. You get out of the way; you don’t get involved in it. Your opponent’s drowning, you don’t go in after him. The Republicans did. “Expectations raised, the president contributed nothing. Instead he dumped ridicule and derision on the Republican leadership seated before him. With that speech, Mr. Obama kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign, and in so doing politicized the economy.” Now, this is Henninger. I… (chuckling) I think everything about Obama has been politicized since before he assumed office, but that of course is just me. Henninger says, “The timing was not good.
“Whether it’s this week’s report that consumer confidence has fallen to a six-month low or anecdotal conversation … the sense grows that people are starting to freak out over the economy — over persistently high unemployment and persistently weak growth. … Private forecasters have reduced their estimates for economic growth the rest of the year well below the 3%-plus the Federal Reserve predicted in April. The Fed’s 2012 growth forecast runs as high as 4.2%,” but it isn’t going to happen, and everybody knows it. “Barack Obama, believing that $800 billion of injected ‘demand’ would lift the economy,” the stimulus bill, “decided to devote his political capital and congressional majorities to reorganizing two major American industries, health care and finance. …
“[B]oth creations rose from the table as 2,000-page laws. Hundreds of thousands of economic actors across the country now wait while the bureaucracies struggle to interpret 4,000 pages of ‘smart’ legislating.” Obama said, “We’re gonna do it better. We’re gonna do it smarter!” So here you had — and, by the way, what was it that created the Tea Party? This kinda stuff, and what is this? People understood automatically, “Two thousand-page bills that they admit with pride they don’t read? We don’t want government this big. This is not what we want.”
We don’t want big there. Finally the term “big government” had something tangible, it wasn’t just an esoteric phrase. Big government was 4,000 pages of legislation that nobody had read. Ergo: Hello, Tea Party. “What evidence do liberals cite for their vestigial faith that these industries, employing millions of people … can grow long term at greater than 3% from beneath the morass of Dodd-Frank and the Obama health-care law?” These two pieces of legislation kill the industries they regulate, and people know it. “It is sometimes unfair to tag presidents with blame for an underperforming economy. Not this time.”
Obama owns it, Joe. He owns this morass. He is its architect.
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