Andrew Sullivan Provides Powerful Antidote To GOP Debate Rhetoric
After watching a Republican presidential debate, I often look for something factual to read as an antidote to all of the distortions and lies the candidates spew about the Obama administration. Last night, I was fortunate enough to come across an excellent article by Andrew Sullivan over at the Daily Beast that refuted practically every claim the GOP candidates made about the president.
It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.
Andrew SullivanHow Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics
The Republican presidential campaigns know their audience very well. Their supporters are as prone as their Democratic counterparts to be underinformed and fiercely partisan, which means that Mitt Romney can calmly assert with a straight face, “we’ve got a president in office three years, and he does not have a jobs plan yet. I’ve got one out there already and I’m not even president, yet.”
It was probably the boldness of this statement that gave it the inside track for the Lie of the Night award. Not only does Romney know about the president’s various jobs plans over the years, he has gone on the record opposing them, which is something you would think political journalists would call him on during a debate.
Between the stimulus and the American Jobs Act not only do we have plans from the Obama White House, we have seen actual progress.
The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.)
Andrew SullivanHow Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics
What Sullivan illuminates in his article is what I have been saying on this blog for some time—that there is a lack of news media coverage on the positive aspects of the Obama presidency so glaring that you have to wonder at times if it is intentional.
