It’s the JOBS, Stupid!

During the run up to last November’s disastrous election, Republicans harped on Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.  Since the election they have done nothing whatsoever to promote job growth and their policies, carried to fruition, will actually cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.  That is why Republicans want to talk about abortion, birth certificates, gay bashing, immigrant bashing, union bashing, debt, deficit…, anything but jobs.  For the most part, Democrats have allowed them to define the terms of the debate, a mad bad mistake, according to Jonathan Nichols and Eugene Robinson.

Republicans never cared about deficit reduction when George Bush was president.

And, for the most part, they don’t care now—as evidenced by broad GOP support for House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan’s plan to keep the budget out of balance until 2040 while clearing the way to begin streaming federal Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid dollars into the coffers of Wall Street speculators and insurance-industry profiteers.

But Republican leaders do care about controlling the debate. When the country is focused on an overblown debate about debts and deficits, that forecloses discussion about the serious economic and social challenges facing the nation. It also forecloses discussion about holding bankers and CEOs accountable for irresponssible and illegal practices that have done far more harm to the nation’s fiscal stability than retirees and the children of low-income families who need a little healthcare.

President Obama’s decision to mimic GOP talking points when it comes to fiscal matters has done more damage to his poll numbers—and Democratic political prospects—than anything said or done by an almostly [sic] hopelessly inept Republican team.

And one Democratic congressman is calling the president out on the issue.

Describing the president’s acceptance of the argument that the most important political issue facing the nation is reducing the deficit as a “terrible mistake,” Congressman Jerry Nadler, D-NY, says: “I strongly believe we should not be talking about deficit reduction.”

That does not mean that Nadler rejects fiscal responsibility, or that he does not believe in making wise choices to get budgets in balance. What it means is that he refuses to buy into the notion that deficit reduction is the only issues [sic]—just as he refuses to buy into the notion that the only way to reduce the deficit is by following the Republican gameplan.

Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other wise Democrats before him, Nadler believes that growing the economy by creating jobs is a far smarter approach than cutting needed programs…  [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Nation>

While I agree with Nichols overall, I think he heaps too much blame at Obama’s feet.  Democrats in the legislature are equally responsible for the failure.

What is it about the word “jobs” that our nation’s leaders fail to understand? How has the most painful economic crisis in decades somehow escaped their notice? Why do they ignore the issues that Americans care most desperately about?

Listening to the debate in Washington, you’d think the nation was absorbed by the compelling saga of deficit reduction. You’d get the impression that in households across America, parents put their children to bed and then stay up half the night sifting through piles of think-tank reports on the kitchen table, trying to calculate whether there will be enough in the Social Security trust fund to pay benefits beyond 2037.

And you’d be wrong. Those parents are looking at a pile of bills on the kitchen table, trying to decide which ones have to be paid now and which can slide. The question isn’t how to manage health care or retirement costs two decades from now. It’s how the family can make it to the end of the month.

President Obama gives signs of beginning to perceive this disconnect. His Republican opponents, not so much… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Washington Post>

Robinson is right about Americans’ attitudes.  Only those with astroturfed brains make the deficit the premier issue.  He is also right that Obama is starting to get it.

What neither author touches is the media’s role in driving the discussion.  I have seen Obama try to shift the debate to jobs on may occasions.  But he is not doing or saying anything the media considers outrageous.  Republicans do almost daily.  There is always some new threat on the table portending gloom and doom, unless they get their way.  Their outrageous behavior always bleeds, so it always leads.  Since they have disguised their plot to transfer wealth upward as deficit reduction, the debate goes to that.

Obama would serve himself well to adopt the People’s Budget, because it focuses on killing the deficit through job creation.