Gil Smart’s column is headed “Democrats got slapped, and probably deserved it.”
“Spin it however you like, people have the distinct impression that the country is in decline. Obama has managed to preside over this, and the Democrats, by extension, owned it.
“But from the other end of the spectrum, the case against Obama is the fact that the economy hasn’t recovered for most people.
The blogger Ian Welsh published two charts last week that sort of tell the tale about the Obama economy: the first was the employment-population ratio, the percentage of working-age Americans who are actually working. It’s dropped like a rock under Obama.”
WATCHDOG: Gil Smart has never quite appreciated that Republican obstruction to fiscal stimulus made the country totally dependent on monetary policy, which ballooned stock values but did little to generate jobs. Except for the initial Bush / Obama $800 million stimulus package that avoided a national and world depression, there was little done to generate jobs.
The Republicans turned their on backs on all that had been learned since the Great Depression from Keynesian Economics of how to rapidly recover from a depressiopn and recession. Simplified, it meant getting people off the dole and putting them to work on federally financed and subsidied projects.
We had expected President Obama to go to national television a day or two before the election, list all of his achievements including drawing down two wars, and make a plea for a Democrat House and Senate to enable him to finally in his last two years achieve programs that conservatives had to date thwarted. He should have told his troops “One more time.”
He did not do that. As a result, many of those loyal to him in two national elections stayed home. The result was Republican landslide.
