freep.com
The starkest disagreement between America’s two major parties is not over what the federal government should do about unemployment, but over who will pay the biggest price if the government does nothing.
President Barack Obama could not have been more clear about his own position in his address to Congress Thursday night:
“The media has proclaimed that it’s impossible to bridge our differences,” he said. “And maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box.
“But know this: The next election is 14 months away. And the people who sent us here -- the people who hired us to work for them -- they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months.”
But in an eye-opening poll of “Republican insiders” — a polyglot of 110 current and former party leaders, nationally recognized strategists, and right-leaning pollsters, more than half those surveyed said it was either “not too important” (36%) or “not at all important” (16%) for the GOP that Congress adopts a major jobs bill by the end of 2011.
“Obama owns the jobs crisis,” observed one of the insiders polled by the highly respected, D.C.-based publication. “Congress will not be blamed or credited for jobs, jobs bill or not.”
Said another insider smugly: “The worse the job showing, the more Republicans get elected in November 2012.”
That’s pretty clear, too: The way these strategists reckon it, the more Americans lose their livelihoods, their homes, and especially their confidence, the bigger the payoff for Republicans.
An obvious corollary is that anything that appears to be making the employment picture better is bad for GOP prospects.
So, dismal as it seems to many Americans, the status quo — widespread economic misery, coupled with the even more pervasive fear that things will get worse before they get better — works for a lot of Republicans.
Over the next several weeks, we’re going to hear a lot of them inveighing against Obama’s jobs bill on the grounds that it’s too ambitious, too expensive, and wouldn’t do anything to stimulate employment.
But while some congressional Republicans sincerely believe that passing a jobs bill won’t make any positive difference, a lot more of them seem to be worried that it would.
Kenneth used to post with glee bad news because he believed bad news was good for democrats. I found it disgusting and stated so at the time. Should a party be work for the benefit of the party instead of the people, it is a bad party. We did not hire them to represent the party (which is what they are doing), we hired them to do their job.
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